The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Celt and Saxon, v1
by George Meredith
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Title: The Celt and Saxon, v1

Author: George Meredith

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4489]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on March 5, 2002]


The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Celt and Saxon, v1, by George Meredith
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CELT AND SAXON

By George Meredith

1910.



CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I.        WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND
II.       MR. ADISTER
III.      CAROLINE
IV.       THE PRINCESS
V.        AT THE PIANOS CHIEFLY WITHOUT MUSIC
VI.       A CONSULTATION: WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSH WOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN
          RACE
VII.      THE MINIATURE
VIII.     CAPTAIN CON AND MRS. ADISTER O'DONNELL
IX.       THE CAPTAIN'S CABIN
X.        THE BROTHERS
XI.       INTRODUCING A NEW CHARACTER

BOOK 2.
XII.      MISS MATTOCK
XIII.     THE DINNER-PARTY
XIV.      OF ROCKNEY
XV.       THE MATTOCK FAMILY
XVI.      OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM:
          AND SOMETHING OF RICHARD ROCKNEY
XVII.     CROSSING THE RUBICON
XVIII.    CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER
X1X.      MARS CONVALESCENT



CELT AND SAXON


BOOK 1.

I.        WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND
II.       MR. ADISTER
III.      CAROLINE
IV.       THE PRINCESS
V.        AT THE PIANOS CHIEFLY WITHOUT MUSIC
VI.       A CONSULTATION: WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSH WOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN
          RACE
VII.      THE MINIATURE
VIII.     CAPTAIN CON AND MRS. ADISTER O'DONNELL
IX.       THE CAPTAIN'S CABIN
X.        THE BROTHERS
XI.       INTRODUCING A NEW CHARACTER



CHAPTER I

WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND

A young Irish gentleman of the numerous clan O'Donnells, and a Patrick,
hardly a distinction of him until we know him, had bound himself, by
purchase of a railway-ticket, to travel direct to the borders of North
Wales, on a visit to a notable landowner of those marches, the Squire
Adister, whose family-seat was where the hills begin to lift and spy into
the heart of black mountains.  Examining his ticket with an apparent
curiosity, the son of a greener island debated whether it would not be
better for him to follow his inclinations, now that he had gone so far as
to pay for the journey, and stay.  But his inclinations were also subject
to question, upon his considering that he had expended pounds English for
the privilege of making the journey in this very train.  He asked himself
earnestly what was the nature of the power which forced him to do it--a
bad genius or a good: and it seemed to him a sort of answer, inasmuch as
it silenced the contending parties, that he had been the victim of an
impetus.  True; still his present position involved a certain outlay of
money simply, not at all his bondage to the instrument it had procured
for him, and that was true; nevertheless, to buy a ticket to shy it away
is an incident so uncommon, that if we can but pause to dwell on the
singularity of the act, we are unlikely to abjure our fellowship with
them who would not be guilty of it; and therefore, by the aid of his
reflections and a remainder of the impetus, Mr. Patrick O'Donnell stepped
into a carriage of the train like any ordinary English traveller, between
whom and his destination there is an agreement to meet if they can.

It is an experience of hesitating minds, be they Saxon or others, that
when we have submitted our persons to the charge of public companies,
immediately, as if the renouncing of our independence into their hands
had given us a taste of a will of our own, we are eager for the
performance of their contract to do what we are only half inclined to;
the train cannot go fast enough to please us, though we could excuse it
for breaking down; stoppages at stations are impertinences, and the
delivery of us at last on the platform is an astonishment, for it is not
we who have done it--we have not even desired it.  To be imperfectly in
accord with the velocity precipitating us upon a certain point, is to be
going without our heads, which have so much the habit of supposing it
must be whither we intend, when we go in a determined manner, that a,
doubt of it distracts the understanding--decapitates us; suddenly to
alight, moreover, and find ourselves dropped at the heels of flying Time,
like an unconsidered bundle, is anything but a reconstruction of the
edifice.  The natural revelry of the blood in speed suffers a violent
shock, not to speak of our notion of being left behind, quite isolated
and unsound.  Or, if you insist, the condition shall be said to belong
exclusively to Celtic nature, seeing that it had been drawn directly from
a scion of one of those tribes.

Young Patrick jumped from the train as headless as good St. Denis.  He
was a juvenile thinker, and to discover himself here, where he both
wished and wished not to be, now deeming the negative sternly in the
ascendant, flicked his imagination with awe of the influence of the
railway service upon the destinies of man.  Settling a mental debate
about a backward flight, he drove across the land so foreign to his eyes
and affections, and breasted a strong tide of wishes that it were in a
contrary direction.  He would rather have looked upon the desert under a
sand-storm, or upon a London suburb yet he looked thirstingly.  Each
variation of landscape of the curved highway offered him in a moment
decisive features: he fitted them to a story he knew: the whole circle
was animated by a couple of pale mounted figures beneath no happy light.
For this was the air once breathed by Adiante Adister, his elder brother
Philip's love and lost love: here she had been to Philip flame along the
hill-ridges, his rose-world in the dust-world, the saintly in his
earthly.  And how had she rewarded him for that reverential love of her?
She had forborne to kill him.  The bitter sylph of the mountain lures men
to climb till she winds them in vapour and leaves them groping, innocent
of the red crags below.  The delicate thing had not picked his bones:
Patrick admitted it; he had seen his brother hale and stout not long
back.  But oh! she was merciless, she was a witch.  If ever queen-witch
was, she was the crowned one!

For a personal proof, now: he had her all round him in a strange district
though he had never cast eye on her.  Yonder bare hill she came racing up
with a plume in the wind: she was over the long brown moor, look where he
would: and vividly was she beside the hurrying beck where it made edges
and chattered white.  He had not seen, he could not imagine her face:
angelic dashed with demon beauty, was his idea of the woman, and there is
little of a portrait in that; but he was of a world where the elemental
is more individual than the concrete, and unconceived of sight she was a
recognised presence for the green-island brain of a youth whose manner of
hating was to conjure her spirit from the air and let fly his own in
pursuit of her.

It has to be stated that the object of the youngster's expedition to
Earlsfont was perfectly simple in his mind, however much it went against
his nature to perform.  it.  He came for the purpose of obtaining Miss
Adister's Continental address; to gather what he could of her from her
relatives, and then forthwith to proceed in search of her, that he might
plead with her on behalf of his brother Philip, after a four years'
division of the lovers.  Could anything be simpler?  He had familiarised
himself with the thought of his advocacy during those four years.  His
reluctance to come would have been accountable to the Adisters by a
sentiment of shame at his family's dealings with theirs: in fact, a
military captain of the O'Donnells had in old days played the adventurer
and charmed a maid of a certain age into yielding her hand to him; and
the lady was the squire of Earlsfont's only sister: she possessed funded
property.  Shortly after the union, as one that has achieved the goal of
enterprise, the gallant officer retired from the service nor did north-
western England put much to his credit the declaration of his wife's
pronouncing him to be the best of husbands.  She naturally said it of him
in eulogy; his own relatives accepted it in some contempt, mixed with a
relish of his hospitality: his wife's were constant in citing his gain by
the marriage.  Could he possibly have been less than that? they
exclaimed.  An excellent husband, who might easily have been less than
that, he was the most devoted of cousins, and the liberal expenditure of
his native eloquence for the furtherance of Philip's love-suit was the
principal cause of the misfortune, if misfortune it could subsequently be
called to lose an Adiante.

The Adister family were not gifted to read into the heart of a young man
of a fanciful turn.  Patrick had not a thought of shame devolving on him
from a kinsman that had shot at a mark and hit it.  Who sees the shame of
taking an apple from a garden of the Hesperides?  And as England
cultivates those golden, if sometimes wrinkled, fruits, it would have
seemed to him, in thinking about it, an entirely lucky thing for the
finder; while a question of blood would have fired his veins to rival
heat of self-assertion, very loftily towering: there were Kings in
Ireland: cry for one of them in Uladh and you will hear his name, and he
has descendants yet!  But the youth was not disposed unnecessarily to
blazon his princeliness.  He kept it in modest reserve, as common
gentlemen keep their physical strength.  His reluctance to look on
Earlsfont sprang from the same source as unacknowledged craving to see
the place, which had precipitated him thus far upon his road: he had a
horror of scenes where a faithless girl had betrayed her lover.  Love was
his visionary temple, and his idea of love was the solitary light in it,
painfully susceptible to coldair currents from the stories of love abroad
over the world.  Faithlessness he conceived to be obnoxious to nature; it
stained the earth and was excommunicated; there could be no pardon of the
crime, barely any for repentance.  He conceived it in the feminine; for
men are not those holy creatures whose conduct strikes on the soul with
direct edge: a faithless man is but a general villain or funny monster, a
subject rejected of poets, taking no hue in the flat chronicle of
history: but a faithless woman, how shall we speak of her!  Women,
sacredly endowed with beauty and the wonderful vibrating note about the
very mention of them, are criminal to hideousness when they betray.  Cry,
False! on them, and there is an instant echo of bleeding males in many
circles, like the poor quavering flute-howl of transformed beasts, which
at some remembering touch bewail their higher state.  Those women are
sovereignly attractive, too, loathsomely.  Therein you may detect the
fiend.

Our moralist had for some time been glancing at a broad, handsome old
country mansion on the top of a wooded hill backed by a swarm of mountain
heads all purple-dark under clouds flying thick to shallow, as from a
brush of sepia.  The dim silver of half-lighted lakewater shot along
below the terrace.  He knew the kind of sky, having oftener seen that
than any other, and he knew the house before it was named to him and he
had flung a discolouring thought across it.  He contemplated it placably
and studiously, perhaps because the shower-folding armies of the fields
above likened its shadowed stillness to that of his Irish home.  There
had this woman lived!  At the name of Earlsfont she became this witch,
snake, deception.  Earlsfont was the title and summary of her black
story: the reverberation of the word shook up all the chapters to pour
out their poison.




CHAPTER II

MR. ADISTER

Mr. Patrick O'Donnell drove up to the gates of Earlsfont notwithstanding
these emotions, upon which light matter it is the habit of men of his
blood too much to brood; though it is for our better future to have a
capacity for them, and the insensible race is the oxenish.

But if he did so when alone, the second man residing in the Celt put that
fellow by and at once assumed the social character on his being requested
to follow his card into Mr. Adister's library.  He took his impression of
the hall that had heard her voice, the stairs she had descended, the door
she had passed through, and the globes she had perchance laid hand on,
and the old mappemonde, and the severely-shining orderly regiment of
books breathing of her whether she had opened them or not, as he bowed to
his host, and in reply to, 'So, sir!  I am glad to see you,' said
swimmingly that Earlsfont was the first house he had visited in this
country: and the scenery reminded him of his part of Ireland: and on
landing at Holyhead he had gone off straight to the metropolis by
appointment to meet his brother Philip, just returned from Canada a full
captain, who heartily despatched his compliments and respects, and hoped
to hear of perfect health in this quarter of the world.  And Captain Con
the same, and he was very flourishing.

Patrick's opening speech concluded on the sound of a short laugh coming
from Mr. Adister.

It struck the young Irishman's ear as injurious and scornful in relation
to Captain Con; but the remark ensuing calmed him:

'He has no children.'

'No, sir; Captain Con wasn't born to increase the number of our clan,'
Patrick rejoined; and thought: By heaven!  I get a likeness of her out of
you, with a dash of the mother mayhap somewhere.  This was his Puck-
manner of pulling a girdle round about from what was foremost in his head
to the secret of his host's quiet observation; for, guessing that such
features as he beheld would be slumped on a handsome family, he was led
by the splendid severity of their lines to perceive an illimitable pride
in the man likely to punish him in his offspring, who would inherit that
as well; so, as is the way with the livelier races, whether they seize
first or second the matter or the spirit of what they hear, the vivid
indulgence of his own ideas helped him to catch the right meaning by the
tail, and he was enlightened upon a domestic unhappiness, although Mr.
Adister had not spoken miserably.  The 'dash of the mother' was thrown in
to make Adiante, softer, and leave a loophole for her relenting.

The master of Earlsfont stood for a promise of beauty in his issue,
requiring to be softened at the mouth and