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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4490 ***
+
+CELT AND SAXON
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1910
+
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MISS MATTOCK
+
+Mrs. Adister O'Donnell, in common with her family, had an extreme dislike
+of the task of composing epistles, due to the circumstance that she was
+unable, unaided, to conceive an idea disconnected with the main theme of
+her communication, and regarded, as an art of conjuring, the use of words
+independent of ideas.  Her native superiority caused her to despise the
+art, but the necessity for employing it at intervals subjected her to
+fits of admiration of the conjurer, it being then evident that a
+serviceable piece of work, beyond her capacity to do, was lightly
+performed by another.  The lady's practical intelligence admitted the
+service, and at the same time her addiction to the practical provoked
+disdain of so flimsy a genius, which was identified by her with the
+genius of the Irish race.  If Irishmen had not been notoriously fighters,
+famous for their chivalry, she would have looked on them as a kind of
+footmen hired to talk and write, whose volubility might be encouraged
+and their affectionateness deserved by liberal wages.  The promptitude
+of Irish blood to deliver the war-cry either upon a glove flung down
+or taken up, raised them to a first place in her esteem: and she was
+a peaceful woman abhorring sanguinary contention; but it was in her
+own blood to love such a disposition against her principles.
+
+She led Patrick to her private room, where they both took seats and
+he selected a pen.  Mr. Patrick supposed that his business would be to
+listen and put her words to paper; a mechanical occupation permitting the
+indulgence of personal phantasies; and he was flying high on them until
+the extraordinary delicacy of the mind seeking to deliver itself forced
+him to prick up all his apprehensiveness.  She wished to convey that she
+was pleased with the news from Vienna, and desired her gratification to
+be imparted to her niece Caroline, yet not so as to be opposed to the
+peculiar feelings of her brother Edward, which had her fullest sympathy;
+and yet Caroline must by no means be requested to alter a sentence
+referring to Adiante, for that would commit her and the writer jointly to
+an insincerity.
+
+'It must be the whole truth, madam,' said Patrick, and he wrote: 'My dear
+Caroline,' to get the start.  At once a magnificently clear course for
+the complicated letter was distinguished by him.  'Can I write on and
+read it to you afterward?  I have the view,' he said.
+
+Mrs. Adister waved to him to write on.
+
+Patrick followed his 'My dear Caroline' with greetings very warm, founded
+on a report of her flourishing good looks.  The decision of Government to
+send reinforcements to Ireland was mentioned as a prelude to the
+information from Vienna of the birth of a son to the Princess Nikolas:
+and then; having conjoined the two entirely heterogeneous pieces of
+intelligence, the composer adroitly interfused them by a careless
+transposition of the prelude and the burden that enabled him to play ad
+libitum on regrets and rejoicings; by which device the lord of Earlsfont
+might be offered condolences while the lady could express her strong
+contentment, inasmuch as he deplored the state of affairs in the sister
+island, and she was glad of a crisis concluding a term of suspense thus
+the foreign-born baby was denounced and welcomed, the circumstances
+lamented and the mother congratulated, in a breath, all under cover of
+the happiest misunderstanding, as effective as the cabalism of Prospero's
+wand among the Neapolitan mariners, by the skilful Irish development on a
+grand scale of the rhetorical figure anastrophe, or a turning about and
+about.
+
+He read it out to her, enjoying his composition and pleased with his
+reconcilement of differences.  'So you say what you feel yourself, madam,
+and allow for the feelings on the other side,' he remarked.  'Shall I
+fold it?
+
+There was a smoothness in the letter particularly agreeable to her
+troubled wits, but with an awful taste.  She hesitated to assent: it
+seemed like a drug that she was offered.
+
+Patrick sketched a series of hooked noses on the blotter.  He heard a
+lady's name announced at the door, and glancing up from his work he
+beheld a fiery vision.
+
+Mrs. Adister addressed her affectionately: 'My dear Jane!' Patrick was
+introduced to Miss Mattock.
+
+His first impression was that the young lady could wrestle with him and
+render it doubtful of his keeping his legs.  He was next engaged in
+imagining that she would certainly burn and be a light in the dark.
+Afterwards he discovered her feelings to be delicate, her looks pleasant.
+Thereupon came one of the most singular sensations he had ever known: he
+felt that he was unable to see the way to please her.  She confirmed it
+by her remarks and manner of speaking.  Apparently she was conducting a
+business.
+
+'You're right, my dear Mrs. Adister, I'm on my way to the Laundry, and I
+called to get Captain Con to drive there with me and worry the manageress
+about the linen they turn out: for gentlemen are complaining of their
+shirt-fronts, and if we get a bad name with them it will ruin us.  Women
+will listen to a man.  I hear he has gone down to the city.  I must go
+and do it alone.  Our accounts are flourishing, I'm glad to say, though
+we cannot yet afford to pay for a secretary, and we want one.  John and I
+verified them last night.  We're aiming at steam, you know.  In three or
+four years we may found a steam laundry on our accumulated capital.  If
+only we can establish it on a scale to let us give employment to at least
+as many women as we have working now!  That is what I want to hear of.
+But if we wait for a great rival steam laundry to start ahead of us, we
+shall be beaten and have to depend on the charitable sentiments of rich
+people to support the Institution.  And that won't do.  So it's a serious
+question with us to think of taking the initiative: for steam must come.
+It 's a scandal every day that it doesn't while we have coal.  I'm for
+grand measures.  At the same time we must not be imprudent: turning off
+hands, even temporarily, that have to feed infants, would be quite
+against my policy.'
+
+Her age struck Patrick as being about twenty-three.
+
+'Could my nephew Arthur be of any use to you?' said Mrs. Adister.
+
+'Colonel Adister?' Miss Mattock shook her head.  'No.'
+
+'Arthur can be very energetic when he takes up a thing.' 'Can he?  But,
+Mrs. Adister, you are looking a little troubled.  Sometimes you confide
+in me.  You are so good to us with your subscriptions that I always feel
+in your debt.'
+
+Patrick glanced at his hostess for a signal to rise and depart.
+
+She gave none, but at once unfolded her perplexity, and requested Miss
+Mattock to peruse the composition of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell and deliver an
+opinion upon it.
+
+The young lady took the letter without noticing its author.  She read it
+through, handed it back, and sat with her opinion evidently formed
+within.
+
+'What do you think of it?' she was asked.
+
+'Rank jesuitry,' she replied.
+
+'I feared so!' sighed Mrs. Adister.  'Yet it says everything I wish to
+have said.  It spares my brother and it does not belie me.  The effect of
+a letter is often most important.  I cannot but consider this letter very
+ingenious.  But the moment I hear it is jesuitical I forswear it.  But
+then my dilemma remains.  I cannot consent to give pain to my brother
+Edward: nor will I speak an untruth, though it be to save him from a
+wound.  I am indeed troubled.  Mr. Patrick, I cannot consent to despatch
+a jesuitical letter.  You are sure of your impression, my dear Jane?'
+
+'Perfectly,' said Miss Mattock.
+
+Patrick leaned to her.  'But if the idea in the mind of the person
+supposed to be writing the letter is accurately expressed?  Does it
+matter, if we call it jesuitical, if the emotion at work behind it
+happens to be a trifle so, according to your definition?'
+
+She rejoined: 'I should say, distinctly it matters.'
+
+'Then you'd not express the emotions at all?'
+
+He flashed a comical look of astonishment as he spoke.  She was not to be
+diverted; she settled into antagonism.
+
+'I should write what I felt.'
+
+'But it might be like discharging a bullet.'
+
+'How?'
+
+'If your writing in that way wounded the receiver.'
+
+'Of course I should endeavour not to wound!'
+
+'And there the bit of jesuitry begins.  And it's innocent while it 's no
+worse than an effort to do a disagreeable thing as delicately as you
+can.'
+
+She shrugged as delicately as she could:
+
+'We cannot possibly please everybody in life.'
+
+'No: only we may spare them a shock: mayn't we?'
+
+'Sophistries of any description, I detest.'
+
+'But sometimes you smile to please, don't you?'
+
+'Do you detect falseness in that?' she answered, after the demurest of
+pauses.
+
+'No: but isn't there a soupcon of sophistry in it?'
+
+'I should say that it comes under the title of common civility.'
+
+'And on occasion a little extra civility is permitted!'
+
+'Perhaps: when we are not seeking a personal advantage.'
+
+'On behalf of the Steam Laundry?'
+
+Miss Mattock grew restless: she was too serious in defending her position
+to submit to laugh, and his goodhumoured face forbade her taking offence.
+
+'Well, perhaps, for that is in the interest of others.'
+
+'In the interests of poor and helpless females.  And I agree with you
+with all my heart.  But you would not be so considerate for the sore
+feelings of a father hearing what he hates to hear as to write a
+roundabout word to soften bad news to him?'
+
+She sought refuge in the reply that nothing excused jesuitry.
+
+'Except the necessities of civilisation,' said Patrick.
+
+'Politeness is one thing,' she remarked pointedly.
+
+'And domestic politeness is quite as needful as popular, you'll admit.
+And what more have we done in the letter than to be guilty of that?  And
+people declare it's rarer: as if we were to be shut up in families to
+tread on one another's corns!  Dear me!  and after a time we should be
+having rank jesuitry advertised as the specific balsam for an unhappy
+domesticated population treading with hard heels from desperate habit and
+not the slightest intention to wound.'
+
+'My dear Jane,' Mrs. Adister interposed while the young lady sat between
+mildly staring and blinking, 'you have, though still of a tender age, so
+excellent a head that I could trust to your counsel blindfolded.  It is
+really deep concern for my brother.  I am also strongly in sympathy with
+my niece, the princess, that beautiful Adiante: and my conscience
+declines to let me say that I am not.'
+
+'We might perhaps presume to beg for Miss Mattock's assistance in the
+composition of a second letter more to her taste,' Patrick said slyly.
+
+The effect was prompt: she sprang from her seat.
+
+'Dear Mrs. Adister!  I leave it to you.  I am certain you and Mr.
+O'Donnell know best.  It's too difficult and delicate for me.  I am
+horribly blunt.  Forgive me if I seemed to pretend to casuistry.  I am
+sure I had no such meaning.  I said what I thought.  I always do.  I
+never meant that it was not a very clever letter; and if it does exactly
+what you require it should be satisfactory.  To-morrow evening John and I
+dine with you, and I look forward to plenty of controversy and amusement.
+At present I have only a head for work.'
+
+'I wish I had that,' said Patrick devoutly.
+
+She dropped her eyes on him, but without letting him perceive that he was
+a step nearer to the point of pleasing her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+OF ROCKNEY
+
+Battles have been won and the streams of History diverted to new channels
+in the space of ten minutes. Ladies have been won, a fresh posterity
+founded, and grand financial schemes devised, revolts arranged, a yoke
+shaken off, in less of mortal time.  Excepting an inspired Epic song and
+an original Theory of the Heavens, almost anything noteworthy may be
+accomplished while old Father Scythe is taking a trot round a courtyard;
+and those reservations should allow the splendid conception to pass for
+the performance, when we bring to mind that the conception is the
+essential part of it, as a bard poorly known to fame was constantly
+urging.  Captain Con had blown his Epic bubbles, not to speak of his
+projected tuneful narrative of the adventures of the great Cuchullin, and
+his Preaching of St. Patrick, and other national triumphs.  He could own,
+however, that the world had a right to the inspection of the Epic books
+before it awarded him his crown.  The celestial Theory likewise would
+have to be worked out to the last figure by the illustrious astronomers
+to whom he modestly ranked himself second as a benefactor of his kind,
+revering him.  So that, whatever we may think in our own hearts, Epic and
+Theory have to remain the exception. Battles indeed have been fought, but
+when you survey the field in preparation for them you are summoned to
+observe the preluding courtesies of civilised warfare in a manner
+becoming a chivalrous gentleman.  It never was the merely flinging of
+your leg across a frontier, not even with the abrupt Napoleon.  You have
+besides to drill your men; and you have often to rouse your foe with a
+ringing slap, if he's a sleepy one or shamming sleepiness.  As here, for
+example: and that of itself devours more minutes than ten.  Rockney and
+Mattock could be roused; but these English, slow to kindle, can't subside
+in a twinkling; they are for preaching on when they have once begun;
+betray the past engagement, and the ladies are chilled, and your wife
+puts you the pungent question: 'Did you avoid politics, Con?' in the
+awful solitude of domestic life after a party.  Now, if only there had
+been freedom of discourse during the dinner hour, the ten disembarrassed
+minutes allotted to close it would have afforded time sufficient for
+hearty finishing blows and a soothing word or so to dear old innocent Mr.
+Rumford, and perhaps a kindly clap of the shoulder to John Mattock, no
+bad fellow at bottom.  Rockney too was no bad fellow in his way.  He
+wanted no more than a beating and a thrashing.  He was a journalist, a
+hard-headed rascal, none of your good old-fashioned order of regimental
+scribes who take their cue from their colonel, and march this way and
+that, right about face, with as little impediment of principles to hamper
+their twists and turns as the straw he tosses aloft at midnight to spy
+the drift of the wind to-morrow.  Quite the contrary; Rockney was his
+own colonel; he pretended to think independently, and tried to be the
+statesman of a leading article, and showed his intention to stem the
+current of liberty, and was entirely deficient in sympathy with the
+oppressed, a fanatical advocate of force; he was an inveterate Saxon,
+good-hearted and in great need of a drubbing.  Certain lines Rockney had
+written of late about Irish affairs recurred to Captain Con, and the
+political fires leaped in him; he sparkled and said: 'Let me beg you to
+pass the claret over to Mr. Rockney, Mr. Rumford; I warrant it for the
+circulating medium of amity, if he'll try it.'
+
+"Tis the Comet Margaux,' said Dr. Forbery, topping anything Rockney might
+have had to say, and anything would have served.  The latter clasped the
+decanter, poured and drank in silence.
+
+''Tis the doctor's antidote, and best for being antedated,' Captain Con
+rapped his friend's knuckles.
+
+'As long as you're contented with not dating in double numbers,' retorted
+the doctor, absolutely scattering the precious minutes to the winds, for
+he hated a provocation.
+
+'There's a golden mean, is there!'
+
+'There is; there's a way between magnums of good wine and gout, and it's
+generally discovered too late.'
+
+'At the physician's door, then! where the golden mean is generally
+discovered to be his fee.  I've heard of poor souls packed off by him
+without an obolus to cross the ferry.  Stripped they were in all
+conscience.'
+
+'You remind me of a fellow in Dublin who called on me for medical advice,
+and found he'd forgotten his purse.  He offered to execute a deed to
+bequeath me his body, naked and not ashamed.'
+
+'You'd a right to cut him up at once, Forbery.  Any Jury 'd have
+pronounced him guilty of giving up the ghost before he called.'
+
+'I let him go, body and all.  I never saw him again.'
+
+'The fellow was not a lunatic.  As for your golden mean, there's a
+saying: Prevention is better than cure: and another that caps it: Drink
+deep or taste not.'
+
+'That's the Pierian Spring.'
+
+'And what is the wine on my table, sir?'
+
+'Exhaustless if your verses come of it.'
+
+'And pure, you may say of the verses and the fount.'
+
+'And neither heady nor over-composed; with a blush like Diana confessing
+her love for the young shepherd: it's one of your own comparisons.'
+
+'Oh!' Con could have roared his own comparisons out of hearing.  He was
+angry with Forbery for his obstructive dulness and would not taste the
+sneaking compliment.  What could Forbery mean by paying compliments and
+spoiling a game!  The ten minutes were dancing away like harmless wood-
+nymphs when the Satyr slumbers.  His eyes ranged over his guests
+despondently, and fixed in desperation on Mr. Rumford, whom his
+magnanimous nature would have spared but for the sharp necessity to
+sacrifice him.
+
+The wine in Rumford at any rate let loose his original nature, if it
+failed to unlock the animal in these other unexcitable Saxons.
+
+'By the way, now I think of it, Mr. Rumford, the interpretation of your
+Royal Standard, which perplexes you so much, strikes me as easy if you
+'ll examine the powerfully different colours of the two beasts in it.'
+
+Mr. Rumford protested that he had abandoned his inquiry: it was a piece
+of foolishness: he had no feeling in it whatever, none.
+
+The man was a perfect snail's horn for coyness.
+
+The circumstances did not permit of his being suffered to slip away: and
+his complexion showed that he might already be classed among the roast.
+
+'Your Lion:--Mr. Rumford, you should know, is discomposed, as a
+thoughtful patriot, by the inexplicable presence of the Unicorn in the
+Royal Standard, and would be glad to account for his one horn and the
+sickly appearance of the beast.  I'm prepared to say he's there to
+represent the fair one half of the population.
+
+Your Lion, my dear sir, may have nothing in his head, but his tawniness
+tells us he imbibes good sound stuff, worthy of the reputation of a noble
+brewery.  Whereas your, Unicorn, true to the character of the numberless
+hosts he stands for, is manifestly a consumer of doctor's drugs.  And
+there you have the symbolism of your country.  Right or left of the
+shield, I forget which, and it is of no importance to the point--you have
+Grandgosier or Great Turk in all his majesty, mane and tail; and on the
+other hand, you behold, as the showman says, Dyspepsia.  And the pair are
+intended to indicate that you may see yourselves complete by looking at
+them separately; and so your Royal Standard is your national mirror; and
+when you gaze on it fondly you're playing the part of a certain Mr.
+Narcissus, who got liker to the Lion than to the Unicorn in the act.  Now
+will that satisfy you?'
+
+'Quite as you please, quite as you please,' Mr. Rumford replied.
+'One loves the banner of one's country--that is all.' He rubbed his
+hands.  'I for one am proud of it.'
+
+'Far be it from me to blame you, my dear sir.  Or there's the alternative
+of taking him to stand for your sole great festival holiday, and
+worshipping him as the personification of your Derbyshire race.'
+
+A glittering look was in Captain Con's eye to catch Rockney if he would
+but rise to it.
+
+That doughty Saxon had been half listening, half chatting to Mr. Mattock,
+and wore on his drawn eyelids and slightly drawn upper lip a look of
+lambent pugnacity awake to the challenge, indifferent to the antagonist,
+and disdainful of the occasion.
+
+'We have too little of your enthusiasm for the flag,' Philip said to Mr.
+Rumford to soothe him, in a form of apology for his relative.
+
+'Surely no! not in England?' said Mr. Rumford, tempted to open his heart,
+for he could be a bellicose gentleman by deputy of the flag.  He
+recollected that the speaker was a cousin of Captain Con's, and withdrew
+into his wound for safety.  'Here and there, perhaps; not when we are
+roused; we want rousing, we greatly prefer to live at peace with the
+world, if the world will let us.'
+
+'Not at any price?' Philip fancied his tone too quakerly.
+
+'Indeed I am not one of that party!' said Mr. Rumford, beginning to glow;
+but he feared a snare, and his wound drew him in again.
+
+'When are you ever at peace!' quoth his host, shocked by the
+inconsiderate punctuality of Mrs. Adister O'Donnell's household, for here
+was the coffee coming round, and Mattock and Rockney escaping without a
+scratch.  'There's hardly a day in the year when your scarlet mercenaries
+are not popping at niggers.'
+
+Rockney had the flick on the cheek to his manhood now, it might be hoped.
+
+'Our what?' asked Mr. Rumford, honestly unable to digest the opprobrious
+term.
+
+'Paid soldiery, hirelings, executioners, whom you call volunteers, by a
+charming euphemism, and send abroad to do the work of war while you
+propound the doctrines of peace at home.'
+
+Rockney's forehead was exquisitely eruptive, red and swelling.  Mattock
+lurched on his chair.  The wine was in them, and the captain commended
+the spiriting of it, as Prospero his Ariel.
+
+Who should intervene at this instant but the wretched Philip, pricked on
+the point of honour as a soldier!  Are we inevitably to be thwarted by
+our own people?
+
+'I suppose we all work for pay,' said he.  'It seems to me a cry of the
+streets to call us by hard names.  The question is what we fight for.'
+
+He spoke with a witless moderation that was most irritating, considering
+the latest news from the old country.
+
+'You fight to subjugate, to enslave,' said Con, 'that's what you're
+doing, and at the same time your journals are venting their fine irony
+at the Austrians and the Russians and the Prussians for tearing Poland to
+strips with their bloody beaks.'
+
+'We obey our orders, and leave you to settle the political business,'
+Philip replied.
+
+Forbery declined the fray.  Patrick was eagerly watchful and dumb.
+Rockney finished his coffee with a rap of the cup in the saucer, an
+appeal for the close of the sitting; and as Dr. Forbery responded to it
+by pushing back his chair, he did likewise, and the other made a
+movement.
+
+The disappointed hero of a fight unfought had to give the signal for
+rising.  Double the number of the ten minutes had elapsed.  He sprang up,
+hearing Rockney say: 'Captain Con O'Donnell is a politician or nothing,'
+and as he was the most placable of men concerning his personality, he
+took it lightly, with half a groan that it had not come earlier, and
+said, 'He thinks and he feels, poor fellow!'
+
+All hope of a general action was over.
+
+'That shall pass for the epitaph of the living,' said Rockney.
+
+It was too late to catch at a trifle to strain it to a tussle.  Con was
+obliged to subjoin: 'Inscribe it on the dungeon-door of tyranny.' But the
+note was peaceful.
+
+He expressed a wish that the fog had cleared for him to see the stars of
+heaven before he went to bed, informing Mr. Mattock that a long look in
+among them was often his prayer at night, and winter a holy season to
+him, for the reason of its showing them bigger and brighter.
+
+'I can tell my wife with a conscience we've had a quiet evening, and
+you're a witness to it,' he said to Patrick.  That consolation remained.
+
+'You know the secret of your happiness,' Patrick answered.
+
+'Know you one of the secrets of a young man's fortune in life, and give
+us a thrilling song at the piano, my son,' said Con: 'though we don't
+happen to have much choice of virgins for ye to-night.  Irish or French.
+Irish are popular.  They don't mind having us musically.  And if we'd go
+on joking to the end we should content them, if only by justifying their
+opinion that we're born buffoons.'
+
+His happy conscience enabled him to court his wife with assiduity and
+winsomeness, and the ladies were once more elated by seeing how
+chivalrously lover-like an Irish gentleman can be after years of wedlock.
+
+Patrick was asked to sing.  Miss Mattock accompanied him at the piano.
+Then he took her place on the music-stool, and she sang, and with an
+electrifying splendour of tone and style.
+
+'But it's the very heart of an Italian you sing with!' he cried.
+
+'It will surprise you perhaps to hear that I prefer German music,' said
+she.
+
+'But where--who had the honour of boasting you his pupil?'
+
+She mentioned a famous master.  Patrick had heard of him in Paris.  He
+begged for another song and she complied, accepting the one he selected
+as the favourite of his brother Philip's, though she said: 'That one?'
+with a superior air.  It was a mellifluous love-song from a popular
+Opera somewhat out of date.  'Well, it's in Italian!' she summed up her
+impressions of the sickly words while scanning them for delivery.
+She had no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer, she
+confessed, yet she sang as if possessed by him.  Had she, Patrick
+thought, been bent upon charming Philip, she could not have thrown more
+fire into the notes.  And when she had done, after thrilling the room,
+there was a gesture in her dismissal of the leaves displaying critical
+loftiness.  Patrick noticed it and said, with the thrill of her voice
+lingering in him: 'What is it you do like?  I should so like to know.'
+
+She was answering when Captain Con came up to the piano and remarked in
+an undertone to Patrick: 'How is it you hit on the song Adiante Adister
+used to sing?'
+
+Miss Mattock glanced at Philip.  He had applauded her mechanically,
+and it was not that circumstance which caused the second rush of scarlet
+over her face.  This time she could track it definitely to its origin.
+A lover's favourite song is one that has been sung by his love.  She
+detected herself now in the full apprehension of the fact before she had
+sung a bar: it had been a very dim fancy: and she denounced herself
+guilty of the knowledge that she was giving pain by singing the stuff
+fervidly, in the same breath that accused her of never feeling things at
+the right moment vividly.  The reminiscences of those pale intuitions
+made them always affectingly vivid.
+
+But what vanity in our emotional state in a great jarring world where we
+are excused for continuing to seek our individual happiness only if we
+ally it and subordinate it to the well being of our fellows!  The
+interjection was her customary specific for the cure of these little
+tricks of her blood.  Leaving her friend Miss Barrow at the piano, she
+took a chair in a corner and said; 'Now, Mr. O'Donnell, you will hear the
+music that moves me.'
+
+'But it's not to be singing,' said Patrick.  'And how can you sing so
+gloriously what you don't care for?  It puzzles me completely.'
+
+She assured him she was no enigma: she hushed to him to hear.
+
+He dropped his underlip, keeping on the conversation with his eyes until
+he was caught by the masterly playing of a sonata by the chief of the
+poets of sound.
+
+He was caught by it, but he took the close of the introductory section,
+an allegro con brio, for the end, and she had to hush at him again, and
+could not resist smiling at her lullaby to the prattler.  Patrick smiled
+in response.  Exchanges of smiles upon an early acquaintance between two
+young people are peeps through the doorway of intimacy.  She lost sight
+of the Jesuit.  Under the influence of good music, too, a not
+unfavourable inclination towards the person sitting beside us and sharing
+that sweetness, will soften general prejudices--if he was Irish, he was
+boyishly Irish, not like his inscrutable brother; a better, or hopefuller
+edition of Captain Con; one with whom something could be done to steady
+him, direct him, improve him.  He might be taught to appreciate Beethoven
+and work for his fellows.  'Now does not that touch you more deeply than
+the Italian?' said she, delicately mouthing: 'I, mio tradito amor!'
+
+'Touch, I don't know,' he was honest enough to reply.  'It's you that
+haven't given it a fair chance I'd like to hear it again.  There's a
+forest on fire in it.'
+
+'There is,' she exclaimed.  'I have often felt it, but never seen it.
+You exactly describe it.  How true!'
+
+'But any music I could listen to all day and all the night,' said he.
+
+'And be as proud of yourself the next morning?'
+
+Patrick was rather at sea.  What could she mean?
+
+Mrs. Adister O'Donnell stepped over to them, with the object of
+installing Colonel Adister in Patrick's place.
+
+The object was possibly perceived.  Mrs. Adister was allowed no time to
+set the manoeuvre in motion.
+
+'Mr. O'Donnell is a great enthusiast for music, and could listen to it
+all day and all night, he tells me,' said Miss Mattock.  'Would he not
+sicken of it in a week, Mrs. Adister?'
+
+'But why should I?' cried Patrick.  'It's a gift of heaven.'
+
+'And, like other gifts of heaven, to the idle it would turn to evil.'
+
+'I can't believe it.'
+
+'Work, and you will believe it.'
+
+'But, Miss Mattock, I want to work; I'm empty-handed.  It 's true I want
+to travel and see a bit of the world to help me in my work by and by.
+I'm ready to try anything I can do, though.'
+
+'Has it ever struck you that you might try to help the poor?'
+
+'Arthur is really anxious, and only doubts his ability,' said Mrs.
+Adister.
+
+'The doubt throws a shadow on the wish,' said Miss Mattock.  'And can one
+picture Colonel Adister the secretary of a Laundry Institution, receiving
+directions from Grace and me!  We should have to release him long before
+the six months' term, when we have resolved to incur the expense of a
+salaried secretary.'
+
+Mrs. Adister turned her head to the colonel, who was then looking down
+the features of Mrs. Rockney.
+
+Patrick said: 'I'm ready, for a year, Miss Mattock.'
+
+She answered him, half jocosely: 'A whole year of free service?  Reflect
+on what you are undertaking.'
+
+'It's writing and accounts, no worse?'
+
+'Writing and accounts all day, and music in the evening only now and
+then.'
+
+'I can do it: I will, if you'll have me.'
+
+'Do you hear Mr. O'Donnell, Mrs. Adister?'
+
+Captain Con fluttered up to his wife, and heard the story from Miss
+Mattock.
+
+He fancied he saw a thread of good luck for Philip in it.  'Our house
+could be Patrick's home capitally,' he suggested to his wife.  She was
+not a whit less hospitable, only hinting that she thought the refusal of
+the post was due to Arthur.
+
+'And if he accepts, imagine him on a stool, my dear madam; he couldn't
+sit it!'
+
+Miss Mattock laughed.  'No, that is not to be thought of seriously.  And
+with Mr. O'Donnell it would be probationary for the first fortnight or
+month.  Does he know anything about steam?'
+
+'The rudimentary idea,' said Patrick.
+
+'That's good for a beginning,' said the captain; and he added: 'Miss
+Mattock, I'm proud if one of my family can be reckoned worthy of
+assisting in your noble work.'
+
+She replied: 'I warn everybody that they shall be taken at their word if
+they volunteer their services.'
+
+She was bidden to know by the captain that the word of an Irish gentleman
+was his bond.  'And not later than to-morrow evening I'll land him at
+your office.  Besides, he'll find countrywomen of his among you, and
+there's that to enliven him.  You say they work well, diligently,
+intelligently.'
+
+She deliberated.  'Yes, on the whole; when they take to their work.
+Intelligently certainly compared with our English.  We do not get the
+best of them in London.  For that matter, we do not get the best of the
+English--not the women of the north.  We have to put up with the rejected
+of other and better-paying departments of work.  It breaks my heart
+sometimes to see how near they are to doing well, but for such a little
+want of ballast.'
+
+'If they're Irish,' said Patrick, excited by the breaking of her heart,
+'a whisper of cajolery in season is often the secret.'
+
+Captain Con backed him for diplomacy.  'You'll learn he has a head, Miss
+Mattock.'
+
+'I am myself naturally blunt, and prefer the straightforward method,'
+said she.
+
+Patrick nodded.  'But where there's an obstruction in the road, it's
+permissible to turn a corner.'
+
+'Take 'em in flank when you can't break their centre,' said Con.
+
+'Well, you shall really try whether you can endure the work for a short
+time if you are in earnest,' Miss Mattock addressed the volunteer.
+
+'But I am,' he said.
+
+'We are too poor at present to refuse the smallest help.'
+
+'And mine is about the smallest.'
+
+'I did not mean that, Mr. O'Donnell.'
+
+'But you'll have me?'
+
+'Gladly.'
+
+Captain Con applauded the final words between them.  They had the genial
+ring, though she accepted the wrong young man for but a shadow of the
+right sort of engagement.
+
+This being settled, by the sudden combination of enthusiastic Irish
+impulse and benevolent English scheming, she very considerately resigned
+herself to Mrs. Adister's lead and submitted herself to a further jolting
+in the unprogressive conversational coach with Colonel Adister, whose
+fault as a driver was not in avoiding beaten ways, but whipping wooden
+horses.
+
+Evidently those two were little adapted to make the journey of life
+together, though they were remarkably fine likenesses of a pair in the
+dead midway of the journey, Captain Con reflected, and he could have
+jumped at the thought of Patrick's cleverness: it was the one bright
+thing of the evening.  There was a clear gain in it somewhere.  And if
+there was none, Jane Mattock was a good soul worth saving.  Why not all
+the benefaction on our side, and a figo for rewards!  Devotees or
+adventurers, he was ready in imagination to see his cousins play the part
+of either, as the cross-roads offered, the heavens appeared to decree.
+We turn to the right or the left, and this way we're voluntary drudges,
+and that way we're lucky dogs; it's all according to the turn, the fate
+of it.  But never forget that old Ireland is weeping!
+
+               O never forget that old Ireland is weeping
+               The bitter salt tears of the mother bereft!
+
+He hummed the spontaneous lines.  He was accused of singing to himself,
+and a song was vigorously demanded of him by the ladies.
+
+He shook his head.  'I can't,' he sighed.  'I was plucking the drowned
+body of a song out of the waters to give it decent burial.  And if I sing
+I shall be charged with casting a firebrand at Mr. Rockney.'
+
+Rockney assured him that he could listen to anything in verse.
+
+'Observe the sneer:--for our verses are smoke,' said Con.
+
+Miss Mattock pressed him to sing.
+
+But he had saddened his mind about old Ireland: the Irish news weighed
+heavily on him, unrelieved by a tussle with Rockney.  If he sang, it
+would be an Irish song, and he would break down in it, he said; and he
+hinted at an objection of his wife's to spirited Irish songs of the sort
+which carry the sons of Erin bounding over the fences of tyranny and the
+brook of tears.  And perhaps Mr. Rockney might hear a tale in verse as
+hard to bear as he sometimes found Irish prose!--Miss Mattock perceived
+that his depression was genuine, not less than his desire to please her.
+'Then it shall be on another occasion,' she said.
+
+'Oh!  on another occasion I'm the lark to the sky, my dear lady.'
+
+Her carriage was announced.  She gave Patrick a look, with a smile, for
+it was to be a curious experiment.  He put on the proper gravity of a
+young man commissioned, without a dimple of a smile.  Philip bowed to her
+stiffly, as we bow to a commanding officer who has insulted us and will
+hear of it.  But for that, Con would have manoeuvred against his wife to
+send him downstairs at the lady's heels.  The fellow was a perfect
+riddle, hard to read as the zebra lines on the skin of a wild jackass--
+if Providence intended any meaning when she traced them! and it's a moot
+point: as it is whether some of our poets have meaning and are not
+composers of zebra.  'No one knows but them above!' he said aloud,
+apparently to his wife.
+
+'What can you be signifying?' she asked him.  She had deputed Colonel
+Arthur to conduct Miss Mattock and Miss Barrow to their carriage, and she
+supposed the sentence might have a mysterious reference to the plan she
+had formed; therefore it might be a punishable offence.  Her small round
+eyes were wide-open, her head was up and high.
+
+She was easily appeased, too easily.
+
+'The question of rain, madam,' he replied to her repetition of his words.
+'I dare say that was what I had in my mind, hearing Mr. Mattock and Mr.
+Rockney agree to walk in company to their clubs.'
+
+He proposed to them that they should delay the march on a visit to his
+cabin near the clouds.  They were forced to decline his invitation to the
+gentle lion's mouth; as did Mr. Rumford, very briskly and thankfully.
+Mr. Rockney was taken away by Mr. and Mrs. Marbury Dyke.  So the party
+separated, and the Englishmen were together, and the Irishmen together;
+and hardly a syllable relating to the Englishmen did the Irishmen say,
+beyond an allusion to an accident to John Mattock's yacht off the Irish
+west-coast last autumn; but the Irishmen were subjected to some remarks
+by the Englishmen, wherein their qualities as individuals and specimens
+of a race were critically and neatly packed.  Common sense is necessarily
+critical in its collision with vapours, and the conscious possessors of
+an exclusive common sense are called on to deliver a summary verdict, nor
+is it an unjust one either, if the verdict be taken simply for an
+estimate of what is presented upon the plain surface of to-day.  Irishmen
+are queer fellows, never satisfied, thirsting for a shindy.  Some of them
+get along pretty well in America.  The air of their Ireland intoxicates
+them.  They require the strong hand: fair legislation, but no show of
+weakness.  Once let them imagine you are afraid of them, and they see
+perfect independence in their grasp.  And what would be the spectacle if
+they were to cut themselves loose from England?  The big ship might be
+inconvenienced by the loss of the tender; the tender would fall adrift on
+the Atlantic, with pilot and captain at sword and pistol, the crew
+playing Donnybrook freely.  Their cooler heads are shrewd enough to see
+the folly, but it catches the Irish fancy to rush to the extreme, and we
+have allowed it to be supposed that it frightens us.  There is the
+capital blunder, fons et origo.
+
+Their leaders now pretend to work upon the Great Scale; they demand
+everything on the spot upon their own interpretation of equity.
+Concessions, hazy speeches, and the puling nonsense of our present
+Government, have encouraged them so far and got us into the mess.  Treat
+them as policemen treat highwaymen: give them the law: and the law must
+be tightened, like the hold on a rogue by his collar, if they kick at it.
+Rockney was for sharp measures in repression, fair legislation in due
+course.
+
+'Fair legislation upon your own interpretation of fair,' said Mattock,
+whose party opposed Rockney's.  'As to repression, you would have missed
+that instructive scene this evening at Con O'Donnell's table, if you had
+done him the kindness to pick up his glove.  It 's wisest to let them
+exhaust their energies upon one another.  Hold off, and they're soon at
+work.'
+
+'What kind of director of a City Company does he make?' said Rockney.
+
+Mattock bethought him that, on the whole, strange to say, Con O'Donnell
+comported himself decorously as a director, generally speaking on the
+reasonable side, not without shrewdness: he seemed to be sobered by the
+money question.
+
+'That wife of his is the salvation of him,' Rockney said, to account for
+the Captain's shrewdness.  'She manages him cleverly.  He knows the
+length of his line.  She's a woman of principle, and barring the
+marriage, good sense too.  His wife keeps him quiet, or we should be
+hearing of him.  Forbery 's a more dangerous man.  There's no intentional
+mischief in Con O'Donnell; it's only effervescence.  I saw his game, and
+declined to uncork him.  He talks of a niece of his wife's: have you ever
+seen her?--married to some Servian or Roumanian prince.'
+
+Mattock answered: 'Yes.'
+
+'Is she such a beauty?'
+
+Again Mattock answered: 'Yes,' after affecting thoughtfulness.
+
+'They seem to marry oddly in that family.'
+
+Mattock let fly a short laugh at the remark, which had the ring of some
+current phrase.  'They do,' he said.
+
+Next morning Jane Mattock spoke to her brother of her recruit.  He
+entirely trusted to her discretion; the idea of a young Irish secretary
+was rather comical, nevertheless.  He had his joke about it, requesting
+to have a sight of the secretary's books at the expiry of the week, which
+was the length of time he granted this ardent volunteer for evaporating
+and vanishing.
+
+'If it releases poor Grace for a week, it will be useful to us,' Jane
+said.  'Women are educated so shamefully that we have not yet found one
+we can rely on as a competent person.  And Mr. O'Donnell--did you notice
+him?  I told you I met him a day or two back--seems willing to be of use.
+It cannot hurt him to try.  Grace has too much on her hands.'
+
+'She has a dozen persons.'
+
+'They are zealous when they are led.'
+
+'Beware of letting them suspect that they are led.'
+
+'They are anxious to help the poor if they can discover how.'
+
+'Good men, I don't doubt,' said John Mattock.  'Any proposals from
+curates recently?'
+
+'Not of late.  Captain O'Donnell, the brother of our secretary, is
+handsomer, but we do not think him so trustworthy.  Did you observe him
+at all?--he sat by me.  He has a conspirator's head.'
+
+'What is that?' her brother asked her.
+
+'Only a notion of mine.'
+
+She was directed to furnish a compendious report of the sayings, doings,
+and behaviour of the Irish secretary in the evening.
+
+'If I find him there,' she said.
+
+Her brother was of opinion that Mr. Patrick O'Donnell would be as good as
+his word, and might be expected to appear there while the novelty lasted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE MATTOCK FAMILY
+
+That evening's report of the demeanour of the young Irish secretary in
+harness was not so exhilarating as John Mattock had expected, and he
+inclined to think his sister guilty of casting her protecting veil over
+the youth.  It appeared that Mr. O'Donnell had been studious of his
+duties, had spoken upon no other topic, had asked pertinent questions,
+shown no flippancy, indulged in no extravagances.  He seemed, Jane said,
+eager to master details.  A certain eagerness of her own in speaking of
+it sharpened her clear features as if they were cutting through derision.
+She stated it to propitiate her brother, as it might have done but for
+the veracious picture of Patrick in the word 'eager,' which pricked the
+scepticism of a practical man.  He locked his mouth, looking at her with
+a twinkle she refused to notice.  'Determined to master details' he could
+have accepted.  One may be determined to find a needle in a dust-heap;
+one does not with any stiffness of purpose go at a dust-heap eagerly.
+Hungry men have eaten husks; they have not betrayed eagerness for such
+dry stuff.  Patrick's voracity after details exhibited a doubtfully
+genuine appetite, and John deferred his amusement until the termination
+of the week or month when his dear good Jane would visit the office to
+behold a vacated seat, or be assailed by the customary proposal.
+Irishmen were not likely to be far behind curates in besieging an
+heiress.  For that matter, Jane was her own mistress and could very well
+take care of herself; he had confidence in her wisdom.
+
+He was besides of an unsuspicious and an unexacting temperament.  The
+things he would strongly object to he did not specify to himself because
+he was untroubled by any forethought of them.  Business, political,
+commercial and marine, left few vacancies in his mind other than for the
+pleasures he could command and enjoy.  He surveyed his England with a
+ruddy countenance, and saw the country in the reflection.  His England
+saw much of itself in him.  Behind each there was more, behind the
+country a great deal more, than could be displayed by a glass.  The
+salient features wore a resemblance.  Prosperity and heartiness; a ready
+hand on, and over, a full purse; a recognised ability of the second-rate
+order; a stout hold of patent principles; inherited and embraced, to make
+the day secure and supply a somniferous pillow for the night; occasional
+fits of anxiety about affairs, followed by an illuminating conviction
+that the world is a changing one and our construction not of granite,
+nevertheless that a justifiable faith in the ship, joined to a constant
+study of the chart, will pull us through, as it has done before, despite
+all assaults and underminings of the common enemy and the particular;
+these, with the humorous indifference of familiarity and constitutional
+annoyances, excepting when they grew acute and called for drugs, and with
+friendliness to the race of man of both colours, in the belief that our
+Creator originally composed in black and white, together with a liking
+for matters on their present footing in slow motion, partly under his
+conductorship, were the prominent characteristics of the grandson of the
+founder of the house, who had built it from a spade.
+
+The story of the building was notorious; popular books for the inciting
+of young Englishmen to dig to fortune had a place for it among the
+chapters, where we read of the kind of man, and the means by which the
+country has executed its later giant strides of advancement.  The first
+John Mattock was a representative of his time; he moved when the country
+was moving, and in the right direction, finding himself at the auspicious
+moment upon a line of rail.  Elsewhere he would have moved, we may
+suppose, for the spade-like virtues bear their fruits; persistent and
+thrifty, solid and square, will fetch some sort of yield out of any soil;
+but he would not have gone far.  The Lord, to whom an old man of a mind
+totally Hebrew ascribed the plenitude of material success, the Lord and
+he would have reared a garden in the desert; in proximity to an oasis,
+still on the sands, against obstacles.  An accumulation of upwards of
+four hundred thousand pounds required, as the moral of the popular books
+does not sufficiently indicate, a moving country, an ardent sphere, to
+produce the sum: and since, where so much was done, we are bound to
+conceive others at work as well as he, it seems to follow that the
+exemplar outstripping them vastly must have profited by situation at
+the start, which is a lucky accident; and an accident is an indigestible
+lump in a moral tale, real though the story be.  It was not mentioned in
+the popular books; nor did those worthy guides to the pursuit of wealth
+contain any reminder of old John Mattock's dependence upon the conjoint
+labour of his fellows to push him to his elevation.  As little did they
+think of foretelling a day, generations hence, when the empty heirs of
+his fellows might prefer a modest claim (confused in statement) to
+compensation against the estate he bequeathed: for such prophecy as that
+would have hinted at a tenderness for the mass to the detriment of the
+individual, and such tenderness as that is an element of our religion,
+not the drift of our teaching.
+
+He grumbled at the heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this
+oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government.  It was
+poor encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a
+mansion!
+
+He paid the money, dying sour; a splendid example of energy on the road,
+a forbidding one at the terminus.  And here the moral of the popular
+books turned aside from him to snatch at humanity for an instance of our
+frailness and dealt in portentous shadows:--we are, it should be known,
+not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be.  Six months before his
+death he appeared in the garb of a navvy, humbly soliciting employment at
+his own house-door.  There he appealed to the white calves of his footmen
+for a day's work, upon the plea that he had never been a democrat.
+
+The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the
+various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had for
+a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the line,
+facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where, as our
+popular words should do, it struck the spectator's eye and his brain
+simultaneously with pugilistic force: a reference to the picture in the
+catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident.  'I've worked a
+good bit in my time, gentlemen, and I baint done yet':--SEE PROFESSOR
+SUMMIT'S 'MEN WHO HAVE COME TO FORTUNE.'  There is, we perceive at a
+glance, a contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying to his
+menials for a day's work at the rate of pay to able-bodied men:--which he
+is not, but the deception is not disingenuous.  The contrast flashed with
+the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring, very popularly.  The
+fustian suit and string below the knee, on the one side, and the purple
+plush breeches and twinkling airy calves (fascinating his attention as he
+makes his humble request to his own, these domestic knights) to right and
+left of the doorway and in front, hit straight out of the canvas.  And as
+quickly as you perceive the contrast you swallow the moral.  The dreaded
+thing is down in a trice, to do what salutary work it may within you.
+That it passed into the blood of England's middle-class population, and
+set many heads philosophically shaking, and filled the sails of many a
+sermon, is known to those who lived in days when Art and the classes
+patronising our Native Art existed happily upon the terms of venerable
+School-Dame and studious pupils, before the sickly era displacing
+Exhibitions full of meaning for tricks of colour, monstrous atmospherical
+vagaries that teach nothing, strange experiments on the complexion of the
+human face divine--the feminine hyper-aethereally.  Like the first John
+Mattock, it was formerly of, and yet by dint of sturdy energy, above the
+people.  They learnt from it; they flocked to it thirsting and retired
+from it thoughtful, with some belief of having drunk of nature in art, as
+you will see the countless troops of urchins about the one cow of London,
+in the Great City's Green Park.
+
+A bequest to the nation of the best of these pictures of Old John, by a
+very old Yorkshire collector, makes it milk for all time, a perpetual
+contrast, and a rebuke.  Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in
+her fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks
+that fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature
+as well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms
+the simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting
+plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the contemplative mind.
+Degeneracy is the critical history of the Arts.  Jane's hair was of a
+reddish gold-inwoven cast that would, in her grandfather's epoch, have
+shone unambiguously as carrots.  The girl of his day thus adorned by
+Nature, would have been shown wearing her ridiculous crown with some
+decent sulkiness; and we should not have had her so unsparingly crowned;
+the truth would have been told in a dexterous concealment--a rope of it
+wound up for a bed of the tortoise-shell comb behind, and a pair of tight
+cornucopias at the temples.  What does our modern artist do but flare it
+to right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, revel in the
+oriental superabundance, and really seem to swear we shall admire it,
+against our traditions of the vegetable, as a poetical splendour.  The
+head of the heiress is in a Jovian shower.  Marigolds are in her hand.
+The whole square of canvas is like a meadow on the borders of June.  It
+causes blinking.
+
+Her brother also is presented: a fine portrait of him, with clipped red
+locks, in blue array, smiling, wearing the rose of briny breezes, a
+telescope under his left arm, his right forefinger on a map, a view of
+Spitzbergen through a cabin-window: for John had notions about the north-
+west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur, was
+not the less a true sailor.
+
+With his brass-buttoned blue coat, and his high coloured cheeks, and his
+convict hair--a layer of brickdust--and his air of princely wealth, and
+the icebergs and hummocks about him, he looks for adventure without a
+thought of his heroism--the country all over.
+
+There he stands, a lover of the sea, and a scientific seaman and engineer
+to boot, practical in every line of his face, defying mankind to suspect
+that he cherishes a grain of romance.  On the wall, just above his
+shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his ship
+in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and so should
+a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready
+for the responsibilities of the title.  Sketches of our ancient wooden
+walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings.  These
+degenerate artists do work hard for their money.
+
+The portrait of John's father, dated a generation back, is just the man
+and little else, phantomly the man.  His brown coat struggles out of the
+obscurity of the background, but it is chiefly background clothing him.
+His features are distinguishable and delicate: you would suppose him
+appearing to you under the beams of a common candle, or cottage coalfire
+--ferruginously opaque.  The object of the artist (apart from the triumph
+of tone on the canvas) is to introduce him as an elegant and faded
+gentleman, rather retiring into darkness than emerging.  He is the ghost
+of the painter's impasto.  Yet this is Ezra Mattock, who multipled the
+inheritance of the hundreds of thousands into millions, and died, after
+covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas with iron rails, one of the few
+Christians that can hold up their heads beside the banking Jew as
+magnates in the lists of gold.  The portrait is clearly no frontispiece
+of his qualities.  He married an accomplished and charitable lady, and
+she did not spoil the stock in refining it.  His life passed quietly;
+his death shook the country: for though it had been known that he had
+been one of our potentates, how mightily he was one had not entered into
+the calculations of the public until the will of the late Ezra Mattock,
+cited in our prints, received comments from various newspaper articles.
+A chuckle of collateral satisfaction ran through the empire.  All England
+and her dependencies felt the state of cousinship with the fruits of
+energy; and it was an agreeable sentiment, coming opportunely, as it did,
+at the tail of articles that had been discussing a curious manifestation
+of late--to-wit, the awakening energy of the foreigner--a prodigious
+apparition on our horizon.  Others were energetic too!  We were not, the
+sermon ran, to imagine we were without rivals in the field.  We were
+possessed of certain positive advantages; we had coal, iron, and an
+industrious population, but we were, it was to be feared, by no means a
+thrifty race, and there was reason for doubt whether in the matter of
+industry we were quite up to the mark of our forefathers.  No
+deterioration of the stock was apprehended, still the nation must be
+accused of a lack of vigilance.  We must look round us, and accept the
+facts as they stood.  So accustomed had we become to the predominance of
+our position that it was difficult at first to realise a position of
+rivalry that threatened our manufacturing interests in their hitherto
+undisputed lead in the world's markets.  The tale of our exports for the
+last five years conveys at once its moral and its warning.  Statistics
+were then cited.
+
+As when the gloomy pedagogue has concluded his exhortation, statistics
+birched the land.  They were started at our dinner-tables, and scourged
+the social converse.  Not less than in the articles, they were perhaps
+livelier than in the preface; they were distressing nevertheless; they
+led invariably to the question of our decadence.  Carthage was named; a
+great mercantile community absolutely obliterated!  Senatorial men were
+led to propose in their thoughtfullest tones that we should turn our
+attention to Art.  Why should we not learn to excel in Art?  We excelled
+in Poetry.  Our Poets were cited: not that there was a notion that poems
+would pay as an export but to show that if we excel in one of the Arts we
+may in others of them.  The poetry was not cited, nor was it necessary,
+the object being to inflate the balloon of paradox with a light-flying
+gas, and prove a poem-producing people to be of their nature born
+artists; if they did but know it.  The explosion of a particular trade
+points to your taking up another.  Energy is adapted to flourish equally
+in every branch of labour.
+
+It is the genius of the will, commanding all the crossroads.  A country
+breeding hugely must prove its energy likewise in the departments of the
+mind, or it will ultimately be unable to feed its young--nay, to feast
+its aldermen!  Let us be up and alive.--Such was the exhortation of a
+profound depression.  Outside these dismal assemblies, in the streets,
+an ancient song of raven recurrence croaked of 'Old England a-going down
+the hill'; for there is a link of electricity between the street-boy and
+the leading article in days when the Poles exchange salutations.
+
+Mr. Ezra's legacy of his millions to son and daughter broke like a golden
+evening on the borders of the raincloud.  Things could not be so bad when
+a plain untitled English gentleman bequeathed in the simplest manner
+possible such giant heaps, a very Pelion upon Ossa, of wealth to his
+children.  The minds of the readers of journals were now directed to
+think of the hoarded treasures of this favoured country.  They might
+approximately be counted, but even if counted they would be past
+conception, like the sidereal system.  The contemplation of a million
+stupefies: consider the figures of millions and millions!  Articles were
+written on Lombard Street, the world's gold-mine, our granary of energy,
+surpassing all actual and fabulous gold-mines ever spoken of: Aladdin's
+magician would find his purse contracting and squeaking in the
+comparison.  Then, too, the store of jewels held by certain private
+families called for remark and an allusion to Sindbad the sailor, whose
+eyes were to dilate wider than they did in the valley of diamonds.  Why,
+we could, if we pleased, lie by and pass two or three decades as jolly
+cricketers and scullers, and resume the race for wealth with the rest of
+mankind, hardly sensible of the holiday in our pockets though we were the
+last people to do it, we were the sole people that had the option.  Our
+Fortunatus' cap was put to better purposes, but to have the cap, and not
+to be emasculated by the possession, might excuse a little reasonable
+pride in ourselves.
+
+Thus did Optimism and Pessimism have their turn, like the two great
+parties in the State, and the subsiding see-saw restored a proper
+balance, much to the nation's comfort.  Unhappily, it was remembered,
+there are spectators of its method of getting to an equipoise out of the
+agitation of extremes.  The peep at our treasures to regain composure
+had, we fear, given the foreigner glimpses, and whetted the appetite of
+our masses.  No sooner are we at peace than these are heard uttering low
+howls, and those are seen enviously glaring.  The spectre, Panic, that
+ever dogs the optimistic feast, warns us of a sack under our beds, and
+robbers about to try a barely-bolted door. . .  Then do we, who have so
+sweetly sung our senses to sleep, start up, in their grip, rush to the
+doctor and the blacksmith, rig alarums, proclaim ourselves intestinally
+torn, defenceless, a prey to foes within and without.  It is discovered
+to be no worse than an alderman's dream, but the pessimist frenzy of the
+night has tossed a quieting sop to the Radical, and summoned the
+volunteers to a review.  Laudatory articles upon the soldierly 'march
+past' of our volunteers permit of a spell of soft repose, deeper than
+prudent, at the end of it, India and Ireland consenting.
+
+So much for a passing outline of John Bull--the shadow on the wall of
+John Mattock.  The unostentatious millionaire's legacy to his two
+children affected Mr. Bull thrillingly, pretty nearly as it has here been
+dotted in lining.  That is historical.  Could he believe in the existence
+of a son of his, a master of millions, who had never sighed (and he had
+only to sigh) to die a peer, or a baronet, or simple Knight?  The
+downright hard-nailed coffin fact was there; the wealthiest man in the
+country had flown away to Shadowland a common Mr.!  You see the straight
+deduction from the circumstances:--we are, say what you will, a
+Republican people!  Newspaper articles on the watch sympathetically for
+Mr. Bull's latest view of himself, preached on the theme of our peculiar
+Republicanism.  Soon after he was observed fondling the Crown Insignia.
+His bards flung out their breezy columns, reverentially monarchial.  The
+Republican was informed that they were despised as a blatant minority.  A
+maudlin fit of worship of our nobility had hold of him next, and English
+aristocracy received the paean.  Lectures were addressed to democrats;
+our House of Lords was pledged solemnly in reams of print.  We were told
+that 'blood' may always be betted on to win the race; blood that is blue
+will beat the red hollow.  Who could pretend to despise the honour of
+admission to the ranks of the proudest peerage the world has known!  Is
+not a great territorial aristocracy the strongest guarantee of national
+stability?  The loudness of the interrogation, like the thunder of Jove,
+precluded thought of an answer.
+
+Mr. Bull, though he is not of lucid memory, kept an eye on the owner of
+those millions.  His bards were awake to his anxiety, and celebrated John
+Mattock's doings with a trump and flourish somewhat displeasing to a
+quietly-disposed commoner.  John's entry into Parliament as a Liberal was
+taken for a sign of steersman who knew where the tide ran.  But your
+Liberals are sometimes Radicals in their youth, and his choice of parties
+might not be so much sagacity as an instance of unripe lightheadedness.
+A young conservative millionaire is less disturbing.  The very wealthy
+young peer is never wanton in his politics, which seems to admonish us
+that the heir of vast wealth should have it imposed on him to accept a
+peerage, and be locked up as it were.  A coronet steadies the brain.
+You may let out your heels at the social laws, you are almost expected to
+do it, but you are to shake that young pate of yours restively under such
+a splendid encumbrance.  Private reports of John, however, gave him
+credit for sound opinions: he was moderate, merely progressive.  When it
+was added that the man had the habit of taking counsel with his sister,
+he was at once considered as fast and safe, not because of any public
+knowledge of the character of Jane Mattock.  We pay this homage to the
+settled common sense of women.  Distinctly does she discountenance leaps
+in the dark, wild driving, and the freaks of Radicalism.
+
+John, as it happened, had not so grave a respect for the sex as for the
+individual Jane.  He thought women capable of acts of foolishness; his
+bright-faced sister he could thoroughly trust for prudent conduct.  He
+gave her a good portion of his heart in confidence, and all of it in
+affection.  There were matters which he excluded from confidence, even
+from intimate communication with himself.  These he could not reveal; nor
+could she perfectly open her heart to him, for the same reason.  They
+both had an established ideal of their personal qualities, not far above
+the positive, since they were neither of them pretentious, yet it was a
+trifle higher and fairer than the working pattern; and albeit they were
+sincere enough, quite sincere in their mutual intercourse, they had, by
+what each knew at times of the thumping organ within them, cause for
+doubting that they were as transparent as the other supposed; and they
+were separately aware of an inward smile at one another's partial
+deception; which did not thwart their honest power of working up to the
+respected ideal.  The stroke of the deeper self-knowledge rarely shook
+them; they were able to live with full sensations in the animated picture
+they were to the eyes best loved by them.  This in fact was their life.
+Anything beside it was a dream, and we do not speak of our dreams--not of
+every dream.  Especially do we reserve our speech concerning the dream in
+which we had a revelation of the proud frame deprived of a guiding will,
+flung rudderless on the waves.  Ah that abject!  The dismantled ship has
+the grandeur of the tempest about it, but the soul swayed by passion is
+ignominiously bare-poled, detected, hooted by its old assumption.  If
+instinct plays fantastical tricks when we are sleeping, let it be ever
+behind a curtain.  We can be held guilty only if we court exposure.  The
+ideal of English gentleman and gentlewoman is closely Roman in the self-
+repression it exacts, and that it should be but occasionally difficult to
+them shows an affinity with the type.  Do you perchance, O continental
+observers of the race, call it hypocritical?  It is their nature
+disciplined to the regimental step of civilisation.  Socially these
+island men and women of a certain middle rank are veterans of an army,
+and some of the latest enrolled are the stoutest defenders of the flag.
+
+Brother and sister preserved their little secrets of character apart.
+They could not be expected to unfold what they declined personally to
+examine.  But they were not so successful with the lady governing the
+household, their widowed maternal aunt, Mrs. Lackstraw, a woman of
+decisive penetration, and an insubordinate recruit of the army aforesaid.
+To her they were without a mask; John was passion's slave, Jane the most
+romantic of Eve's daughters.  She pointed to incidents of their youth;
+her vision was acutely retrospective.  The wealth of her nephew and niece
+caused such a view of them to be, as she remarked, anxious past
+endurance.  She had grounds for fearing that John, who might step to an
+alliance with any one of the proudest houses in the Kingdom, would marry
+a beggar-maid.  As for Jane, she was the natural prey of a threadbare
+poet.  Mrs. Lackstraw heard of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell, and demanded the
+right to inspect him.  She doubted such perfect disinterestedness in any
+young man as that he should slave at account-keeping to that Laundry
+without a prospect of rich remuneration, and the tale of his going down
+to the city for a couple of hours each day to learn the art of keeping
+books was of very dubious import in a cousin of Captain Con O'Donnell.
+'Let me see your prodigy,' she said, with the emphasis on each word.
+Patrick was presented at her table.  She had steeled herself against an
+Irish tongue.  He spoke little, appeared simple, professed no enthusiasm
+for the Laundry.  And he paid no compliments to Jane: of the two he was
+more interested by the elder lady, whose farm and dairy in Surrey he
+heard her tell of with a shining glance, observing that he liked thick
+cream: there was a touch of home in it.  The innocent sensuality in the
+candid avowal of his tastes inspired confidence.  Mrs. Lackstraw fished
+for some account of his home.  He was open to flow on the subject; he
+dashed a few sketches of mother and sisters, dowerless girls, fresh as
+trout in the stream, and of his own poor estate, and the peasantry, with
+whom he was on friendly terms.  He was an absentee for his education.
+Sweet water, pure milk, potatoes and bread, were the things he coveted in
+plenty for his people and himself, he said, calling forth an echo from
+Mrs. Lackstraw, and an invitation to come down to her farm in the Spring.
+'That is, Mr. O'Donnell, if you are still in London.'
+
+'Oh, I'm bound apprentice for a year,' said he.
+
+He was asked whether he did not find it tiresome work.
+
+'A trifle so,' he confessed.
+
+Then why did he pursue it, the question was put.
+
+He was not alive for his own pleasure, and would like to feel he was
+doing a bit of good, was the answer.
+
+Could one, Mrs. Lackstraw asked herself, have faith in this young
+Irishman?  He possessed an estate.  His brogue rather added to his air of
+truthfulness.  His easy manners and the occasional streak of correct
+French in his dialogue cast a shadow on it.  Yet he might be an ingenuous
+creature precisely because of the suspicion roused by his quaint
+unworldliness that he might be a terrible actor.  Why not?--his heart was
+evidently much more interested in her pursuits than in her niece's.  The
+juvenility of him was catching, if it was indeed the man, and not one of
+the actor's properties.  Mrs. Lackstraw thought it prudent to hint at the
+latter idea to Jane while she decided in her generosity to embrace the
+former.  Oh! if all Irishmen shared his taste for sweet water, pure milk
+and wholesome bread, what a true Union we should have!  She had always
+insisted on those three things as most to be desired on earth for the
+masses, and she reminded Jane of it as a curious fact.  Jane acquiesced,
+having always considered it a curious fact that her aunt should combine
+the relish of a country life with the intensest social ambition--
+a passion so sensitive as to make the name her husband had inflicted on
+her a pain and a burden.  The name of Mattock gave her horrors.  She
+spoke of it openly to prove that Jane must marry a title and John become
+a peer.  Never was there such a name to smell of the soil.  She declared
+her incapacity to die happy until the two had buried Mattock.  Her own
+one fatal step condemned her, owing to the opinion she held upon the
+sacredness of marriage, as Lackstraw on her tombstone, and to Lackstraw
+above the earthly martyr would go bearing the designation which marked
+her to be claimed by him.  But for John and Jane the index of Providence
+pointed a brighter passage through life.  They had only to conquer the
+weakness native to them--the dreadful tendency downward.  They had, in
+the spiritual sense, frail hearts.  The girl had been secretive about the
+early activity of hers, though her aunt knew of two or three adventures
+wanting in nothing save boldness to have put an end to her independence
+and her prospects:--hence this Laundry business!  a clear sign of some
+internal disappointment.  The boy, however, had betrayed himself in his
+mother's days, when it required all her influence and his father's
+authority, with proof positive of the woman's unworthiness, to rescue him
+from immediate disaster.
+
+Mrs. Lackstraw's confidences on the theme of the family she watched over
+were extended to Patrick during their strolls among the ducks and fowls
+and pheasants at her farm.  She dealt them out in exclamations, as much
+as telling him that now they knew him they trusted him, notwithstanding
+the unaccountable part he played as honorary secretary to that Laundry.
+The confidences, he was aware, were common property of the visitors one
+after another, but he had the knowledge of his being trusted as not every
+Irishman would have been.  A service of six months to the secretaryship
+established his reputation as the strange bird of a queer species: not
+much less quiet, honest, methodical, than an Englishman, and still
+impulsive, Irish still; a very strange bird.
+
+The disposition of the English to love the children of Erin, when not
+fretted by them, was shown in the treatment Patrick received from the
+Mattock family.  It is a love resembling the affection of the stage-box
+for a set of favourite performers, and Patrick, a Celt who had schooled
+his wits to observe and meditate, understood his position with them as
+one of the gallant and amusing race, as well as the reason why he had won
+their private esteem.  They are not willingly suspicious: it agitates
+their minds to be so; and they are most easily lulled by the flattery of
+seeing their special virtues grafted on an alien stock: for in this
+admiration of virtues that are so necessary to the stalwart growth of
+man, they become just sensible of a minor deficiency; the tree, if we
+jump out of it to examine its appearance, should not be all trunk.  Six
+months of ungrudging unremunerated service, showing devotion to the good
+cause and perfect candour from first to last, was English, and a poetic
+touch beyond: so that John Mattock, if he had finished the sentence
+instead of lopping it with an interjection, would have said: 'These Irish
+fellows, when they're genuine and first rate!--are pretty well the pick
+of the land.'  Perhaps his pause on the interjection expressed a doubt
+of our getting them genuine.  Mr. O'Donnell was a sort of exceptional
+Irishman, not devoid of practical ability in a small way--he did his
+duties of secretary fairly well; apparently sincere--he had refrained
+from courting Jane; an odd creature enough, what with his mixture of
+impulsiveness and discretion; likeable, pleasant to entertain and talk
+to; not one of your lunatics concerning his country--he could listen to
+an Englishman's opinion on that head, listen composedly to Rockney,
+merely seeming to take notes; and Rockney was, as Captain Con termed him,
+Press Dragoon about Ireland, a trying doctor for a child of the patient.
+
+On the whole, John Mattock could shake his hand heartily when he was
+leaving our shores.  Patrick was released by Miss Grace Barrow's
+discovery at last of a lady capable of filling his place: a circumstance
+that he did not pretend to regret.  He relinquished his post and stood
+aside with the air of a disciplined soldier.  This was at the expiration
+of seven months and two weeks of service.  Only after he had gone, upon
+her receiving his first letter from the Continent, did Jane distinguish
+in herself the warmth of friendliness she felt for him, and know that of
+all around her she, reproaching every one who had hinted a doubt, had
+been the most suspicious of his pure simplicity.  It was the vice of her
+condition to be suspicious of the honesty of men.  She thought of her
+looks as less attractive than they were; of her wealth she had reason to
+think that the scent transformed our sad sex into dogs under various
+disguises.  Remembering her chill once on hearing Patrick in a green lane
+where they botanised among spring flowers call himself her Irish cousin,
+as if he had advanced a step and betrayed the hoof, she called him her
+Irish cousin now in good earnest.  Her nation was retrospectively
+enthusiastic.  The cordiality of her letter of reply to the wandering
+Patrick astonished him on the part of so cool a young lady; and Captain
+Con, when he heard Miss Mattock speak of Patrick to his wife, came to the
+conclusion that the leery lad had gone a far way toward doing the trick
+for himself, though Jane said his correspondence was full of the deeds of
+his brother in India.  She quite sparkled in speaking of this boy.
+
+She and the captain had an interchange of sparklings over absent Patrick,
+at a discovery made by Miss Colesworth, the lady replacing him, in a nook
+of the amateur secretary's official desk, under heaps of pamphlets and
+slips, French and English and Irish journals, not at all bearing upon the
+business of the Laundry.  It was a blotting-pad stuffed with Patrick's
+jottings.  Jane brought it to Con as to the proper keeper of the
+reliquary.  He persuaded her to join him in examining it, and together
+they bent their heads, turning leaf by leaf, facing, laughing, pursuing
+the search for more, sometimes freely shouting.
+
+Her inspection of the contents had previously been shy; she had just
+enough to tell her they were funny.  Dozens of scraps, insides of torn
+envelopes, invitation-cards, ends of bills received from home, whatever
+was handy to him at the moment, had done service for the overflow of Mr.
+Secretary's private notes and reflections; the blotting-paper as well;
+though that was devoted chiefly to sketches of the human countenance,
+the same being almost entirely of the fair.  Jane fancied she spied
+herself among the number.  Con saw the likeness, but not considering
+it a complimentary one, he whisked over the leaf.  Grace Barrow was
+unmistakeable.  Her dimpled cushion features, and very intent eyes gazing
+out of the knolls and dingles, were given without caricature.  Miss
+Colesworth appeared on the last page, a half-length holding a big key,
+demure between curls.  The key was explained by a cage on a stool, and a
+bird flying out.  She had unlocked the cage for Patrick.
+
+'He never seemed anxious to be released while he was at work,' said Jane,
+after she and the captain had spelt the symbolling in turns.
+
+'And never thirsted to fly till he flew, I warrant him,' said Con.
+
+A repeated sketch of some beauty confused them both; neither of them
+could guess the proud owner of those lineaments.  Con proclaimed it to be
+merely one of the lad's recollections, perhaps a French face.  He thought
+he might have seen a face rather resembling it, but could not call to
+mind whose face it was.
+
+'I dare say it's just a youngster's dream on a stool at a desk, as poets
+write sonnets in their youth to nobody, till they're pierced by somebody,
+and then there's a difference in their handwriting,' he said, vexed with
+Patrick for squandering his opportunity to leave a compliment to the
+heiress behind him.
+
+Jane flipped the leaves back to the lady with stormy hair.
+
+'But you'll have the whole book, and hand it to him when he returns; it
+'ll come best from you,' said Con.  'The man on horseback, out of
+uniform, 's brother Philip, of course.  And man and horse are done to the
+life.  Pray, take it, Miss Mattock.  I should lose it to a certainty; I
+should; I can't be trusted.  You'll take it!'
+
+He pressed her so warmly to retain the bundle in her custody that she
+carried it away.
+
+Strange to say the things she had laughed at had been the things which
+struck her feelings and sympathies.  Patrick's notes here and there
+recalled conversations he had more listened to than taken part in between
+herself and Grace Barrow.  Who could help laughing at his ideas about
+women!  But if they were crude, they were shrewd--or so she thought them;
+and the jejuneness was, to her mind, chiefly in the dressing of them.
+Grace agreed with her, for Grace had as good a right to inspect the
+papers as she, and a glance had shown that there was nothing of peculiar
+personal import in his notes: he did not brood on himself.
+
+Here was one which tickled the ladies and formed a text for discussion.
+
+'Women must take the fate of market-fruit till they earn their own
+pennies, and then they 'll regulate the market.  It is a tussle for money
+with them as with us, meaning power.  They'd do it as little by oratory
+as they have done by millinery, for their oratory, just like their
+millinery, appeals to a sentiment, and to a weaker; and nothing solid
+comes of a sentiment.  Power is built on work.'
+
+To this was appended: 'The better for mankind in the developing process,
+ay, and a bad day for us, boys, when study masks the charming eyes in
+gig-lamps, and there is no pretty flying before us.  Good-night to Cupid,
+I fear.  May be I am not seeing far enough, and am asking for the devil
+to have the loveliest women as of old.  Retro S. M.'
+
+The youthful eye on their sex, the Irish voice, and the perceptible moral
+earnestness in the background, made up a quaint mixture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM: AND SOMETHING
+OF RICHARD ROCKNEY
+
+Meanwhile India, our lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and Ireland,
+our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber.  The volcano we
+couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at an
+armistice with the gastric juices.  Once more the personification of the
+country's prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness.
+Trade whipped him merrily, and he spun.
+
+A fuller sketch of the figure of this remarkable emanation of us and
+object of our worship, Bull, is required that we may breathe the
+atmosphere of a story dealing with such very different views of the idol,
+and learn to tolerate plain-speaking about him.
+
+Fancy yourself delayed by stress of weather at an inn or an excursion,
+and snapped up by some gossip drone of the district, who hearing whither
+you are bound, recounts the history and nature of the place, to your
+ultimate advantage, though you groan for the outer downpour to abate.--
+Of Bull, then: our image, before the world: our lord and tyrant, ourself
+in short--the lower part of us.  Coldly worshipped on the whole, he can
+create an enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up to peaceful
+skies and the domestic English world spins with him.  What he does not
+like will then be the forbidding law of a most governable people, what
+he does like the consenting.  If it is declared that argument will be
+inefficacious to move him, he is adored in the form of post.  A hint of
+his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous rush of his devotees.
+Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the fanatical subserviency
+from the example of our subject India.  We may deem it native; perhaps
+of its origin Aryan, but we have made it our own.  Some have been so
+venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to the protecting
+smiles of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to encourage the
+development of a wanton eccentricity.  Certain weeds of the human bosom
+are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be guaranteed.  Men,
+for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone to the same sort
+of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to it which we
+behold in his tidal bodies of supporters.  Neptune has done something.
+One thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the
+utmost.  Spy you insecurity?--a possibility of invasion?  Then indeed the
+colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any
+suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer.  But as there is no
+attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.
+Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger
+across the Channel on a windy night:--Take heart, son John!  They will
+have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you.  The testification to
+the Sea-God's watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately as
+horny to argument as before.  Neptune shall have his share of the
+honours.
+
+Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of
+heresy, opposition to his image.  It is an exercise of imagination to
+accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner of
+the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that flowering
+stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily casts out
+what it cannot consume.  He is a positive shape, a practical corporation,
+and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the
+Press and his jester Frank Guffaw.  There, begirt by laughing ocean-
+waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that
+other Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so
+wonderful as printed sheets.  Rounder at each inspection, he preaches to
+mankind from the text of a finger curved upon the pattern spectacles.
+Your Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering on tentative politics; your
+Germans ploughing in philosophy, thumbing classics, composing music of a
+novel order: both are marching, evolutionising, learning how to kill.
+Ridiculous Germans! capricious Frenchmen!  We want nothing new in
+musical composition and abstract speculation of an indecent mythology,
+or political contrivances and schemes of Government, and we do not want
+war.  Peace is the Goddess we court for the hand of her daughter Plenty,
+and we have won that jolly girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-
+feast; but avaunt new-fangled theories and howlings: old tunes, tried
+systems, for us, my worthy friends.
+
+Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic
+invitation to the leaner kine.  It can exhibit to the world that Peace is
+a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping the
+pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth.  Bull's perusal
+of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat meads;
+he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for a sign of
+his diligent wisdom in seizing the day.  He can read the page fronting
+him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will vociferously
+confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe there is no such
+thing as a present hour for man.
+
+In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate.  Often do we
+have him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
+spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
+him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without one bit
+of tracery on its black breast other than that which his apprehensions
+project.  As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes, thinner than the
+phantom banquets of recollection.  What has he done for the growth of his
+globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful posture the upper, and
+justly the directing globe, through whose directions we do, by feeding on
+the past to sow the future, create a sensible present composed of both--
+the present of the good using of our powers.  What can he show in the
+Arts?  What in Arms?  His bards--O faithless!  but they are men--his
+bards accuse him of sheer cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility
+of brain, drowsihood, mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness.  They
+question him to deafen him of our defences, our intellectual eminence,
+our material achievements, our poetry, our science; they sneer at his
+trust in Neptune, doubt the scaly invulnerability of the God.  They
+point over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident
+foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in
+industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour
+of verse=-our supreme accomplishment.
+
+Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his
+pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is
+down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,
+lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports
+from camps of foreign armies.  He drops his head like a smitten ox to all
+great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining
+apostrophe.  He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what
+poetry means.  If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness in
+times of reverse.  Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are the
+generators of the conquering energies.  He is now for brains at all
+costs, he has gained a conception of them.  He is ready to knock
+knighthood on the heads of men of brains--even literary brains.  They
+shall be knights, an ornamental body.  To make them peers, and a
+legislative, has not struck him, for he has not yet imagined them a
+stable body.  They require petting, to persuade them to flourish and
+bring him esteem.
+
+This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed as
+though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.
+Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his
+nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud of
+it.  Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country,
+unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit
+of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for the
+sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win
+affection.  Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to
+go without the gift of expression.  Its behaviour is honourable under a
+discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful
+speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men.  Salt is
+in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim
+its virtues.  They will not; they are averse.  The only voice it has is
+the Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil
+the charm.  So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch
+of Bull.  We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes,
+by no means delighting in his representation of them.  When such is felt
+to be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as a
+vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour--we enjoy
+grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome: our subtle
+conceit insists on the reverse.  Nevertheless, no sooner are the hours
+auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family goat,
+ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness.  And he is
+at times a mad Bull: a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving,
+excessive, very parlous Bull.  It is in his history that frenzies catch
+him, when to be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to
+mention a shattering of our timbers.  It is but in days of the rousing of
+the under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the
+advent of, that we are well rid of him for a while.  In the interim he
+does mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he
+paid the Dannegelt for peace.  Englishmen of feeling do not relish him.
+For men with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund
+grotesque, with his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of
+the pocket, his fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness, is
+a shame and a loathing.  You attach small importance to images and
+symbols; yet if they seem representative, and they sicken numbers of us,
+they are important.  The hat we wear, though it is not a part of the
+head, stamps the character of our appearance and has a positive influence
+on our bearing.  Symbolical decorations will stimulate the vacant-minded
+to act up to them, they encircle and solidify the mass; they are a sword
+of division between Celts and Saxons if they are abhorrent to one
+section.  And the Celtic brotherhood are not invariably fools in their
+sensitiveness.  They serve you on the field of Mars, and on other fields
+to which the world has given glory.  These execrate him as the full-grown
+Golden Calf of heathenish worship.  And they are so restive because they
+are so patriotic.  Think a little upon the ideas of unpatriotic Celts
+regarding him.  You have heard them.  You tell us they are you:
+accurately, they affirm, succinctly they see you in his crescent
+outlines, tame bulk, spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker; his
+imperviousness to whatsoever does not confront the sensual eye of
+him with a cake or a fist, his religious veneration of his habitual
+indulgences, his peculiar forms of nightmare.  They swear to his
+perfect personification of your moods, your Saxon moods, which their
+inconsiderate spleen would have us take for unmixedly Saxon.  They are
+unjust, but many of them speak with a sense of the foot on their necks,
+and they are of a blood demanding a worshipworthy idea.  And they dislike
+Bull's bellow of disrespect for their religion, much bruited in the
+meadows during his periods of Arcadia.  They dislike it, cannot forget
+the sound: it hangs on the afflicted drum of the ear when they are in
+another land, perhaps when the old devotion to their priest has expired.
+For this, as well as for material reasons, they hug the hatred they
+packed up among their bundles of necessaries and relics, in the flight
+from home, and they instruct their children to keep it burning.  They
+transmit the sentiment of the loathing of Bull, as assuredly they would
+be incapable of doing, even with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed
+motherly Britannia the figure sitting in the minds of men for our image
+--a palpitating figure, alive to change, penetrable to thought, and not a
+stolid concrete of our traditional old yeoman characteristic.  Verily he
+lives for the present, all for the present, will be taught in sorrow that
+there is no life for him but of past and future: his delusion of the
+existence of a present hour for man will not outlast the season of his
+eating and drinking abundantly in security.  He will perceive that it was
+no more than the spark shot out from the clash of those two meeting
+forces; and penitently will he gaze back on that misleading spark-the
+spectral planet it bids wink to his unreceptive stars--acknowledging him
+the bare machine for those two to drive, no instrument of enjoyment.  He
+lives by reading rearward and seeing vanward.  He has no actual life save
+in power of imagination.  He has to learn this fact, the great lesson of
+all men.  Furthermore there may be a future closed to him if he has
+thrown too extreme a task of repairing on that bare machine of his.  The
+sight of a broken-down plough is mournful, but the one thing to do with
+it is to remove it from the field.
+
+Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet
+of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and
+vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank.  A journalist
+altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained,
+he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he
+was profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain.
+He had a manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the
+antechamber for proof of his knowing himself to be this person.  He did
+not so much write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver
+Orphic sentences.  He was in one her physician, her spiritual director,
+her man-at-arms.  Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic
+assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of
+the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show.  He meant hard steel to
+defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state, and
+the monition for her soul's welfare.  Nor did he pretend to special
+privileges in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had studied
+her case, was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly, not to
+say inspiredly.  Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as wisely,
+then all his weapons to back you.  There were occasions when
+distinguished officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus
+of Rockney's approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to
+bestow it.  The act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the
+objects propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of any
+man adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of his
+attachment.  If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed
+generally, they travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they
+were precipitated, the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at
+a more enlightened passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney's.  Others
+perchance might equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the
+vigilant circumspection, the shaping forethought.  That clear knowledge
+of the right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others.
+Enough to profit them this way and yonder as one best can!  You know the
+newspaper Press is a mighty engine.  Still he had no delight in shuffling
+a puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures.  His calls for
+them resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.
+
+Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the
+world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating
+devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency,
+notwithstanding that the commencement of his journalistic career smelt
+of sources entirely opposed to the conclusions upon which it broadened.
+One secret of the belief in his love of his country was the readiness of
+Rockney's pen to support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of the
+bluff besides.  His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on our
+streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than the
+island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and threads
+in the island.  Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of cowardice:
+how one man stood against a host for law or humanity, how crowds looked
+on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight was maintained in some sly
+ring between two of equal brawn: and manufacturers were warned of the
+consequences of their iniquities, Government was lashed for sleeping upon
+shaky ordinances, colonists were gibbeted for the maltreating of natives:
+the ring and fervour of the notes on daily events told of Rockney's hand
+upon the national heart--with a faint, an enforced, reluctant indication
+of our not being the men we were.
+
+But after all, the main secret was his art of writing round English,
+instead of laborious Latinised periods: and the secret of the art was his
+meaning what he said.  It was the personal throb.  The fire of a mind was
+translucent in Press columns where our public had been accustomed to the
+rhetoric of primed scribes.  He did away with the Biscay billow of the
+leading article--Bull's favourite prose--bardic construction of sentences
+that roll to the antithetical climax, whose foamy top is offered and
+gulped as equivalent to an idea.  Writing of such a kind as Rockney's was
+new to a land where the political opinions of Joint Stock Companies had
+rattled Jovian thunders obedient to the nod of Bull.  Though not alone in
+working the change, he was the foremost.  And he was not devoid of style.
+Fervidness is the core of style.  He was a tough opponent for his betters
+in education, struck forcibly, dexterously, was always alert for debate.
+An encounter between Swift and Johnson, were it imaginable, would present
+us probably the most prodigious Gigantomachy in literary polemics.  It is
+not imaginable among comparative pygmies.  But Rockney's combat with his
+fellow-politicians of the Press partook of the Swiftian against the
+Johnsonian in form.  He was a steam ram that drove straight at the bulky
+broadside of the enemy.
+
+Premiers of parties might be Captains of the State for Rockney: Rockney
+was the premier's pilot, or woe to him.  Woe to the country as well,
+if Rockney's directions for steering were unheeded.  He was a man of
+forethought, the lover of Great Britain: he shouted his directions in
+the voice of the lover of his mistress, urged to rebuke, sometimes to
+command, the captain by the prophetic intimations of a holier alliance,
+a more illumined prescience.  Reefs here, shallows there, yonder a foul
+course: this is the way for you!  The refusal of the captain to go this
+way caused Rockney sincerely to discredit the sobriety of his intellect.
+It was a drunken captain.  Or how if a traitorous?  We point out the
+danger to him, and if he will run the country on to it, we proclaim him
+guilty either of inebriety or of treason--the alternatives are named:
+one or the other has him.  Simple unfitness can scarcely be conceived
+of a captain having our common senses and a warranted pilot at his elbow.
+
+Had not Rockney been given to a high expression of opinion, plain in
+fervour, he would often have been exposed bare to hostile shafts.  Style
+cast her aegis over him.  He wore an armour in which he could walk, run
+and leap-a natural style.  The ardour of his temperament suffused the
+directness of his intelligence to produce it, and the two qualities made
+his weakness and strength.  Feeling the nerve of strength, the weakness
+was masked to him, while his opponents were equally insensible to the
+weakness under the force of his blows.  Thus there was nothing to teach
+him, or reveal him, except Time, whose trick is to turn corners of
+unanticipated sharpness, and leave the directly seeing and ardent to dash
+at walls.
+
+How rigidly should the man of forethought govern himself, question
+himself!  how constantly wrestle with himself!  And if he be a writer
+ebullient by the hour, how snappishly suspect himself, that he may feel
+in conscience worthy of a hearing and have perpetually a conscience in
+his charge!  For on what is his forethought founded?  Does he try the
+ring of it with our changed conditions?  Bus a man of forethought who has
+to be one of our geysers ebullient by the hour must live days of fever.
+His apprehensions distemper his blood; the scrawl of them on the dark of
+the undeveloped dazzles his brain.  He sees in time little else; his very
+sincereness twists him awry.  Such a man has the stuff of the born
+journalist, and journalism is the food of the age.  Ask him, however,
+midway in his running, what he thinks of quick breathing: he will answer
+that to be a shepherd on the downs is to be more a man.  As to the
+gobbling age, it really thinks better of him than he of it.
+
+After a term of prolonged preachification he is compelled to lash that he
+may less despise the age.  He has to do it for his own sake.  O gobbling
+age!  swallowing all, digesting nought, us too you have swallowed,
+O insensate mechanism!  and we will let you know you have a stomach.
+Furiously we disagree with you.  We are in you to lead you or work you
+pangs!
+
+Rockney could not be a mild sermoniser commenting on events.  Rather no
+journalism at all for him!  He thought the office of the ordinary daily
+preacher cowlike.  His gadfly stung him to warn, dictate, prognosticate;
+he was the oracle and martyr of superior vision: and as in affairs of
+business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool sagacity, hard
+on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct discrimination of
+things in their roughness, the knowledge of the firmly-based materialism
+of his nature caused him.  thoroughly to trust to his voice when he
+delivered it in ardour--circumstance coming to be of daily recurrence.
+Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without-which incessant journalism
+is a gabble.  He was sure of his love, but who gave ear to his
+prescience?  Few: the echo of the country now and then, the Government
+not often.  And, dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers, mere commentators
+upon events, manage somehow to keep up the sale of their journals:
+advertisements do not flow and ebb with them as under the influence of a
+capricious moon.  Ah, what a public!  Serve it honourably, you are in
+peril of collapsing: show it nothing but the likeness of its dull animal
+face, you are steadily inflated.  These reflections within us!  Might not
+one almost say that the retreat for the prophet is the wilderness, far
+from the hustled editor's desk; and annual should be the uplifting of his
+voice instead of diurnal, if only to spare his blood the distemper?
+A fund of gout was in Rockney's, and he had begun to churn it.  Between
+gouty blood and luminous brain the strife had set in which does not
+conduce to unwavering sobriety of mind, though ideas remain closely
+consecutive and the utterance resonant.
+
+Never had he been an adulator of Bull.  His defects as well as his
+advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue.  Insisting on a
+future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.
+In the season of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the crisis
+he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English tongue was
+loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery.  Our monumental
+image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at a despot
+constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures to mock the
+gift of liberty.  His articles of foregone years were an extraordinary
+record of events or conditions foreseen: seductive in the review of them
+by a writer who has to be still foreseeing: nevertheless, that none of
+them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have acted wisely
+in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their essential merit,
+consolatory to think of, though painful.  The country has gone the wrong
+road, but it may yet cross over to the right one, when it perceives that
+we were prophetic.
+
+Compared with the bolts discharged at Bull by Rockney's artillery,
+Captain Con O'Donnell's were popgun-pellets.  Only Rockney fired to
+chasten, Con O'Donnell for a diversion, to appease an animus.  The
+revolutionist in English journalism was too devoutly patriotic to
+belabour even a pantomime mask that was taken as representative of us for
+the disdainful fun of it.  Behind the plethoric lamp, now blown with the
+fleshpots, now gasping puffs of panic, he saw the well-minded valorous
+people, issue of glorious grandsires; a nation under a monstrous
+defacement, stupefied by the contemplation of the mask: his vision
+was of the great of old, the possibly great in the graver strife ahead,
+respecters of life, despisers of death, the real English whereas an
+alienated Celtic satirist, through his vivid fancy and his disesteem,
+saw the country incarnate in Bull, at most a roguish screw-kneed clown to
+be whipped out of him.  Celt and Saxon are much inmixed with us, but the
+prevalence of Saxon blood is evinced by the public disregard of any
+Celtic conception of the honourable and the loveable; so that the Celt
+anxious to admire is rebutted, and the hatred of a Celt, quick as he is
+to catch at images, has a figure of hugeous animalism supplied to his
+malign contempt.  Rockney's historic England, and the living heroic
+England to slip from that dull hide in a time of trial, whether of war or
+social suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan
+lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a
+discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do justice; he has
+Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in
+labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer.  And this is
+the creature to whose tail he is tied!  Hereditary hatred is approved by
+critical disgust.  Some spirited brilliancy, some persistent generosity
+(other than the guzzle's flash of it), might soften him; something
+sweeter than the slow animal well-meaningness his placable brethren point
+his attention to.  It is not seen, and though he can understand the
+perils of a severance, he prefers to rub the rawness of his wound and be
+ready to pitch his cap in the air for it, out of sheer bloodloathing of
+a connection that offers him nothing to admire, nothing to hug to his
+heart.  Both below and above the blind mass of discontent in his island,
+the repressed sentiment of admiration-or passion of fealty and thirst to
+give himself to a visible brighter--is an element of the division:
+meditative young Patrick O'Donnell early in his reflections had noted
+that:--and it is partly a result of our daily habit of tossing the straw
+to the monetary world and doting on ourselves in the mirror, until our
+habitual doings are viewed in a bemused complacency by us, and the scum-
+surface of the country is flashed about as its vital being.  A man of
+forethought using the Press to spur Parliament to fitly represent the
+people, and writing on his daily topics with strenuous original vigour,
+even though, like Rockney, he sets the teeth of the Celt gnashing at him,
+goes a step nearer to the bourne of pacification than Press and
+Parliament reflecting the popular opinion that law must be passed to
+temper Ireland's eruptiveness; for that man can be admired, and the Celt,
+in combating him, will like an able and gallant enemy better than a
+grudgingly just, lumbersome, dull, politic friend.  The material points
+in a division are always the stronger, but the sentimental are here very
+strong.  Pass the laws; they may put an extinguisher on the Irish
+Vesuvian; yet to be loved you must be a little perceptibly admirable.
+You may be so self-satisfied as to dispense with an ideal: your yoke-
+fellow is not; it is his particular form of strength to require one for
+his proper blooming, and he does bloom beautifully in the rays he courts.
+
+Ah then, seek to be loved, and banish Bull.  Believe in a future and
+banish that gross obscuration of you.  Decline to let that old-yeoman-
+turned alderman stand any longer for the national man.  Speaking to the
+brain of the country, one is sure of the power of a resolute sign from it
+to dismiss the brainless.  Banish him your revels and your debatings,
+prohibit him your Christmas, lend no ear either to his panics or his
+testiness, especially none to his rages; do not report him at all,
+and he will soon subside into his domestic, varied by pothouse, privacy.
+The brain should lead, if there be a brain.  Once free of him, you will
+know that for half a century you have appeared bottom upward to mankind.
+And you have wondered at the absence of love for you under so astounding
+a presentation.  Even in a Bull, beneficent as he can dream of being,
+when his notions are in a similar state of inversion, should be sheepish
+in hope for love.
+
+He too, whom you call the Welshman, and deride for his delight in songful
+gatherings, harps to wild Wales, his Cambrian highlands, and not to
+England.  You have not yet, though he is orderly and serviceable, allured
+his imagination to the idea of England.  Despite the passion for his
+mountains and the boon of your raising of the interdict (within a hundred
+years) upon his pastors to harangue him in his native tongue, he gladly
+ships himself across the waters traversed by his Prince Madoc of
+tradition, and becomes contentedly a transatlantic citizen, a member of
+strange sects--he so inveterate in faithfulness to the hoar and the
+legendary!--Anything rather than Anglican.  The Cymry bear you no hatred;
+their affection likewise is undefined.  But there is reason to think that
+America has caught the imagination of the Cambrian Celt: names of
+Welshmen are numerous in the small army of the States of the Union; and
+where men take soldier-service they are usually fixed, they and their
+children.  Here is one, not very deeply injured within a century, of
+ardent temperament, given to be songful and loving; he leaves you and
+forgets you.  Be certain that the material grounds of division are not
+all.  To pronounce it his childishness provokes the retort upon your
+presented shape.  He cannot admire it.  Gaelic Scots wind the same note
+of repulsion.
+
+And your poets are in a like predicament.  Your poets are the most
+persuasive of springs to a lively general patriotism.  They are in the
+Celtic dilemma of standing at variance with Bull; they return him his
+hearty antipathy, are unable to be epical or lyrical of him, are
+condemned to expend their genius upon the abstract, the quaint, the
+picturesque.  Nature they read spiritually or sensually, always
+shrinkingly apart from him.  They swell to a resemblance of their patron
+if they stoop to woo his purse.  He has, on hearing how that poets bring
+praise to nations, as in fact he can now understand his Shakespeare to
+have done, been seen to thump the midriff and rally them for their
+shyness of it, telling them he doubts them true poets while they abstain
+from singing him to the world-him, and the things refreshing the centre
+of him.  Ineffectual is that encouragement.  Were he in the fire, melting
+to the iron man, the backbone of him, it would be different.  At his
+pleasures he is anti-hymnic, repellent to song.  He has perceived the
+virtues of Peace, without the brother eye for the need of virtuousness to
+make good use of them and inspire the poet.  His own enrolled
+unrhythmical bardic troops (humorous mercenaries when Celts) do his
+trumpeting best, and offend not the Pierides.
+
+This interlude, or rather inter-drone, repulsive to write, can hardly be
+excluded from a theme dramatising Celtic views, and treating of a blood,
+to which the idea of country must shine resplendently if we would have it
+running at full tide through the arteries.  Preserve your worship, if the
+object fills your optics.  Better worship that than nothing, as it is
+better for flames to be blown out than not to ascend, otherwise it will
+wreak circular mischief instead of illumining.  You are requested simply
+to recollect that there is another beside you who sees the object
+obliquely, and then you will not be surprised by his irreverence.  What
+if, in the end, you were conducted to a like point of view? Self-worship,
+it has been said, is preferable to no trimming of the faculty, but
+worship does not necessarily cease with the extinction of this of
+the voraciously carnal.  An ideal of country, of Great Britain, is
+conceivable that will be to the taste of Celt and Saxon in common, to
+wave as a standard over their fraternal marching.  Let Bull boo his
+drumliest at such talk: it is, I protest, the thing we want and can have.
+He is the obstruction, not the country; and against him, not against the
+country, the shots are aimed which seem so malignant.  Him the gay
+manipulators propitiate who look at him through Literature and the Press,
+and across the pulpit-cushions, like airy Macheath at Society, as carrion
+to batten on.  May plumpness be their portion, and they never hanged for
+it!  But the flattering, tickling, pleasantly pinching of Bull is one of
+those offices which the simple starveling piper regards with afresh
+access of appetite for the well-picked bone of his virtue.  That ghastly
+apparition of the fleshly present is revealed to him as a dead whale,
+having the harpoon of the inevitable slayer of the merely fleshly in his
+oils.  To humour him, and be his piper for his gifts, is to descend to a
+carnival deep underneath.  While he reigns, thinks this poor starveling,
+Rome burns, or the explosive powders are being secretly laid.  He and his
+thousand Macheaths are dancing the country the giddy pace, and there
+will, the wretch dreads, be many a crater of scoria in the island, before
+he stretches his inanimate length, his parasites upon him.  The theme is
+chosen and must be treated as a piper involved in his virtue conceives
+it: that is, realistically; not with Bull's notion of the realism of the
+butcher's shop and the pendent legs of mutton and blocks of beef painted
+raw and glaring in their streaks, but with the realism of the active
+brain and heart conjoined.  The reasons for the division of Celt and
+Saxon, what they think and say of one another, often without knowing that
+they are divided, and the wherefore of our abusing of ourselves, brave
+England, our England of the ancient fortitude and the future incarnation,
+can afford to hear.  Why not in a tale?  It is he, your all for animal
+pleasure in the holiday he devours and cannot enjoy, whose example
+teaches you to shun the plaguey tale that carries fright: and so you find
+him sour at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because he
+harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the smallest
+admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp a little over his work,
+and allow his pleasures to inspire a dose of thoughtfulness, he would be
+happier, and--who knows?-become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued from
+the pole-axe.
+
+Now the rain is over, your carriage is at the door, the country smiles
+and the wet highway waves a beckoning hand.  We have worn through a cloud
+with cloudy discourses, but we are in a land of shifting weathers,
+'coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum,' not every chapter can be
+sunshine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CROSSING THE RUBICON
+
+Rough weather on the Irish sea discharged a pallid file of passengers
+from the boat at Holyhead just as the morning sun struck wave and
+mountain with one of the sudden sparkling changes which our South-welters
+have in their folds to tell us after a tumultuous night that we have only
+been worried by Puck.  The scene of frayed waters all rosy-golden, and
+golden-banded heathery height, with the tinted sand, breaking to flights
+of blue, was resplendent for those of our recent sea-farers who could
+lift an eye to enjoy it.  Freshness, illumination, then salt air, vivid
+distances, were a bath for every sense of life.  You could believe the
+breast of the mountain to be heaving, the billows to be kissing fingers
+to him, the rollers shattered up the cliff to have run to extinction to
+scale him.  He seemed in his clear-edged mass King of this brave new
+boundless world built in a minute out of the wreck of the old.
+
+An hour back the vessel was labouring through rueful chasms under
+darkness, and then did the tricksy Southwest administer grisly slaps to
+right and left, whizzing spray across the starboard beam, and drenching
+the locks of a young lady who sat cloaked and hooded in frieze to teach
+her wilfulness a lesson, because she would keep her place on deck from
+beginning to end of the voyage.  Her faith in the capacity of Irish
+frieze to turn a deluge of the deeps driven by an Atlantic gale was
+shaken by the time she sighted harbour, especially when she shed showers
+by flapping a batlike wing of the cloak, and had a slight shudder to find
+herself trickling within.
+
+'Dear!  and I'm wet to the skin,' she confided the fact to herself
+vocally.
+
+'You would not be advised,' a gentleman beside her said after a delicate
+pause to let her impulsive naturalism of utterance fly by unwounded.
+
+'And aren't you the same and worse?  And not liking it either, I fear,
+Sir!' she replied, for despite a manful smile his complexion was tell-
+tale.  'But there 's no harm in salt.  But you should have gone down to
+the cabin with Father Boyle and you would have been sure of not catching
+cold.  But, Oh!  the beautiful .  .  .  look at it!  And it's my first
+view of England.  Well, then, I'll say it's a beautiful country.'
+
+Her companion looked up at the lighted sky, and down at the pools in
+tarpaulin at his feet.  He repressed a disposition to shudder, and with
+the anticipated ecstasy of soon jumping out of wet clothes into dry, he
+said: 'I should like to be on the top of that hill now.'
+
+The young lady's eyes flew to the top.
+
+'They say he looks on Ireland; I love him; and his name is Caer Gybi; and
+it was one of our Saints gave him the name, I 've read in books.  I'll be
+there before noon.'
+
+'You want to have a last gaze over to Erin?'
+
+'No, it's to walk and feel the breeze.  But I do, though.'
+
+'Won't you require a little rest?'
+
+'Sure and I've had it sitting here all night!' said she.
+
+He laughed: the reason for the variation of exercise was conclusive.
+
+Father Boyle came climbing up the ladder, uncertain of his legs; he
+rolled and snatched and tottered on his way to them, and accepted the
+gentleman's help of an arm, saying: 'Thank ye, thank ye, and good
+morning, Mr. Colesworth.  And my poor child!  what sort of a night has
+it been above, Kathleen?'
+
+He said it rather twinkling, and she retorted:
+
+'What sort of a night has it been below, Father Boyle?' Her twinkle was
+livelier than his, compassionate in archness.
+
+'Purgatory past is good for contemplation, my dear.  'Tis past, and
+there's the comfort!  You did well to be out of that herring-barrel,
+Mr. Colesworth.  I hadn't the courage, or I would have burst from it to
+take a ducking with felicity.  I haven't thrown up my soul; that's the
+most I can say.  I thought myself nigh on it once or twice.  And an
+amazing kind steward it was, or I'd have counted the man for some one
+else.  Surely 'tis a glorious morning?'
+
+Mr. Colesworth responded heartily in praise of the morning.  He was
+beginning to fancy that he felt the warmth of spring sunshine on his
+back.  He flung up his head and sniffed the air, and was very like a
+horse fretful for the canter; so like as to give Miss Kathleen an idea of
+the comparison.  She could have rallied him; her laughing eyes showed the
+readiness, but she forbore, she drank the scene.  Her face, with the
+threaded locks about forehead and cheeks, and the dark, the blue, the
+rosy red of her lips, her eyes, her hair, was just such a south-western
+sky as April drove above her, the same in colour and quickness; and much
+of her spirit was the same, enough to stand for a resemblance.  But who
+describes the spirit?  No one at the gates of the field of youth.  When
+Time goes reaping he will gather us a sheaf, out of which the picture
+springs.
+
+'There's our last lurch, glory to the breakwater!' exclaimed Father
+Boyle, as the boat pitched finally outside the harbour fence, where a
+soft calm swell received them with the greeting of civilised sea-nymphs.
+'The captain'll have a quieter passage across.  You may spy him on the
+pier.  We'll be meeting him on the landing.'
+
+'If he's not in bed, from watching the stars all night,' said Miss
+Kathleen.
+
+'He must have had a fifty-lynx power of sight for that, my dear.'
+
+'They did appear, though, and wonderfully bright,' she said.  'I saw them
+come out and go in.  It's not all cloud when the high wind blows.'
+
+'You talk like a song, Kathleen.'
+
+'Couldn't I rattle a throat if I were at home, Father!'
+
+'Ah!  we're in the enemy's country now.'
+
+Miss Kathleen said she would go below to get the handbags from the
+stewardess.
+
+Mr. Colesworth's brows had a little darkened over the Rev. Gentleman's
+last remark.  He took two or three impatient steps up and down with his
+head bent.  'Pardon me; I hoped we had come to a better understanding,'
+he said.  'Is it quite fair to the country and to Miss O'Donnell to
+impress on her before she knows us that England is the enemy?'
+
+'Habit, Mr. Colesworth, habit!  we've got accustomed to the perspective
+and speak accordingly.  There's a breach visible.'
+
+'I thought you agreed with me that good efforts are being made on our
+side to mend the breach.'
+
+'Sir, you have a noble minority at work, no doubt; and I take you for one
+of the noblest, as not objecting to stand next to alone.'
+
+'I really thought, judging from our conversation at Mrs. O'Donnell's that
+evening, that you were going to hold out a hand and lead your flock to
+the right sort of fellowship with us.'
+
+'To submission to the laws, Mr. Colesworth; 'tis my duty to do it as
+pastor and citizen.'
+
+'No, to more than that, sir.  You spoke with friendly warmth.'
+
+'The atmosphere was genial, if you remember the whisky and the fumes of
+our tobacco at one o'clock!'
+
+'I shall recollect the evening with the utmost pleasure.  You were kind
+enough to instruct me in a good many things I shall be sure to profit by.
+I wish I could have spent more time in Ireland.  As it is, I like
+Irishmen so well that if the whole land were in revolt I should never
+call it the enemy's country.'
+
+'Excellently spoken, Mr. Colesworth,' said the priest.  'We 'll hope your
+writings may do service to mend the breach.  For there is one, as you
+know, and more 's the pity; there's one, and it's wide and deep.  As my
+friend Captain Con O'Donnell says, it's plain to the naked eye as a pair
+of particularly fat laundry drawers hung out to dry and ballooned in
+extension--if mayhap you've ever seen the sight of them in that state:--
+just held together by a narrow neck of thread or button, and stretching
+away like a corpulent frog in the act of swimming on the wind.  His
+comparison touches the sentiment of disunion, sir.'
+
+Mr. Colesworth had not ever seen such a pair of laundry drawers inflated
+to symbolise the breach between Ireland and England; nor probably, if he
+had, would the sentiment of national disunion have struck his mind: it
+was difficult to him in the description.  He considered his Rev. friend
+to be something of a slippery fish, while Father Boyle's opinion of him
+likewise referred him to an elemental substance, of slow movement-earth,
+in short: for he continued to look argumentative after all had been said.
+
+Or perhaps he threw a coveting eye on sweet Miss Kathleen and had his own
+idea of mending a stitch of the breach in a quite domestic way.  If so,
+the Holy Father would have a word to say, let alone Kathleen.  The maids
+of his Church do not espouse her foes.  For the men it is another matter:
+that is as the case may be.  Temporarily we are in cordial intercourse,
+Mr. Colesworth.
+
+Miss Kathleen returned to deck carrying her bags.  The gentleman had to
+descend, and subsequently an amiable dissension arose on the part of the
+young lady and Mr. Colesworth.  She, however, yielded one of her bags,
+and he, though doubly laden, was happy.  All very transparent to pastoral
+observation, but why should they not be left to their chirruping
+youthfulness?  The captain was not in view, and Father Boyle wanted to
+go to bed for refreshment, and Kathleen was an airy gossamer, with a boy
+running after it, not by any means likely to catch it, or to keep it if
+he did.  Proceed and trip along, you young ones!
+
+At the hotel they heard that Captain Con O'Donnell was a snug sleeper
+upstairs.  This, the captain himself very soon informed them, had not
+been the kernel of the truth.  He had fancied they would not cross the
+Channel on so rattlesome a night, or Kathleen would have had an Irish
+kiss to greet her landing in England.  But the cousinly salute was little
+delayed, news of the family in Ireland and England was exchanged, and
+then Mr. Colesworth and the captain bowed to an introduction; and the
+captain, at mention of his name, immediately cried out that Mr.
+Colesworth might perchance be a relative of the highly intelligent
+admirable lady who had undertaken the secretaryship, and by her vast
+ability got the entire management, of Miss Mattock's benevolent
+institution, and was conducting it with such success that it was fast
+becoming a grief to the generous heart of the foundress of the same to
+find it not only self-paying, but on the road to a fortune, inasmuch as
+it was already an article in the decrees of fashion among the nobility
+and gentry of both sexes in the metropolis to have their linen and laces
+washed at the Mattock laundry.
+
+Mr. Colesworth said he was the brother of the lady in question, he had
+also the pleasure of an acquaintance with Miss Mattock.  He was
+vehemently congratulated on the relationship, which bore witness, the
+captain armed, to a certain hereditary share of brains greatly to be
+envied: brother of Miss Colesworth, a title of distinction in itself!
+He was congratulated not less cordially for his being so fortunate as to
+know Miss Mattock, one of a million.
+
+Captain Con retained the hand of Father Boyle and squeezed it during his
+eulogies, at the same time dispensing nods and winks and sunny sparkles
+upon Kathleen.  Mr. Colesworth went upstairs to his room not unflattered.
+The flattery enveloped him in the pleasant sense of a somehow now
+established companionship for the day with a pleasant person from
+whom he did not wish to separate.
+
+'You made the gentleman's acquaintance, my dear .  .  . ?' said Con.
+
+Kathleen answered: 'He made friends with our Patrick on the Continent,
+I think it was in Germany, and came to us to study the old country,
+bearing a letter from Patrick.  He means to be one of their writers on
+the newspapers.  He studies everything; he has written books.  He called
+on us coming and called on us going and we came over together,' said Miss
+Kathleen.  'But tell me: our Philip?'
+
+'Books!' Con exclaimed.  'It's hard to discover a man in these days who
+hasn't written books.  Oh!  Philip!  Ease your heart about Philip.
+They're nursing him, round.  He was invalided at the right moment for
+him, no fear.  I gave him his chance of the last vacant seat up to the
+last hour, and now the die is cast and this time I 'm off to it.  Poor
+Philip--yes, yes!  we 're sorry to see him flat all his length, we love
+him; he's a gallant soldier; alive to his duty; and that bludgeon sun of
+India knocked him down, and that fall from his horse finished the
+business, and there he lies.  But he'll get up, and he might have
+accepted the seat and spared me my probation: he's not married, I am,
+I have a wife, and Master Philip divides me against my domestic self,
+he does.  But let that be: I serve duty too.  Not a word to our friend up
+yonder.  It's a secret with a time-fuse warranted to explode safe enough
+when the minutes are up, and make a powerful row when it does.  It is all
+right over there, Father Boyle, I suppose?'
+
+'A walk over!  a pure ceremonial,' said the priest, and he yawned
+frightfully.
+
+'You're for a nap to recompose you, my dear friend,' remarked the
+captain.
+
+'But you haven't confided anything of it to Mrs. Adister?'
+
+'Not a syllable; no.  That's to come.  There's my contest!  I had urgent
+business in Ireland, and she 's a good woman, always willing to let me
+go.  I count on her kindness, there 's no mightier compliment to one's
+wife.  She'll know it when it's history.  She's fond of history.  Ay, she
+hates fiction, and so I'm proud to tell her I offer her none.  She likes
+a trifling surprise too, and there she has it.  Oh!  we can whip up the
+business to a nice little bowl of froth-flummery.  But it's when the
+Parliamentary voting is on comes the connubial pull.  She's a good woman,
+a dear good soul, but she's a savage patriot; and Philip might have saved
+his kinsman if he had liked.  He had only to say the word: I could have
+done all the business for him, and no contest to follow by my fireside.
+He's on his couch--Mars convalescent: a more dreadful attraction to the
+ladies than in his crimson plumes!  If the fellow doesn't let slip his
+opportunity!  with his points of honour and being an Irish Bayard.  Why
+Bayard in the nineteenth century's a Bedlamite, Irish or no.  So I tell
+him.  There he is; you'll see him, Kathleen: and one of them as big an
+heiress as any in England.  Philip's no fool, you'll find.'
+
+'Then he's coming all right, is he?' said Kathleen.
+
+'He 's a soldier, and a good one, but he 's nothing more, and as for
+patriotic inflammation, doesn't know the sensation.'
+
+'Oh! but he's coming round, and you'll go and stroke down mother with
+that,' Kathleen cried.  'Her heart's been heavy, with Patrick wandering
+and Philip on his back.  I'll soon be dressed for breakfast.'
+
+Away she went.
+
+'She's got an appetite, and looks like a strapped bit of steel after the
+night's tumbling,' said the captain, seeing her trip aloft.  'I'm young
+as that too, or not far off it.  Stay, I'll order breakfast for four in a
+quiet corner where we can converse--which, by the way, won't be possible
+in the presence of that gaping oyster of a fellow, who looks as if he
+were waiting the return of the tide.'
+
+Father Boyle interposed his hand.
+
+'Not for .  .  .' he tried to add 'four.' The attempt at a formation of
+the word produced a cavernous yawn a volume of the distressful deep to
+the beholder.
+
+'Of course,' Captain Con assented.  He proposed bed and a sedative
+therein, declaring that his experience overnight could pronounce it good,
+and that it should be hot.  So he led his tired old friend to the
+bedroom, asked dozens of questions, flurried a withdrawal of them,
+suggested the answers, talked of his Rubicon, praised his wife, delivered
+a moan on her behalf, and after assisting to half disrobe the scarce
+animate figure, which lent itself like an artist's lay-model to the
+operation, departed on his mission of the sedative.
+
+At the breakfast for three he was able to tell Kathleen that the worthy
+Father was warm, and on his way to complete restoration.
+
+'Full fathom five the Father lies, in the ocean of sleep, by this time,'
+said Con.  'And 'tis a curious fact that every man in that condition
+seems enviable to men on their legs.  And similarly with death; we'd
+rather not, because of a qualm, but the picture of the finish of the leap
+across is a taking one.  These chops are done as if Nature had mellowed
+their juiciness.'
+
+'They are so nice,' Kathleen said.
+
+'You deserve them, if ever girl in this world!'
+
+'I sat on deck all night, and Mr. Colesworth would keep me company.'
+
+'He could hardly do less, having the chance.  But that notwithstanding,
+I'm under an obligation to your cavalier.  And how did you find Ireland,
+sir?  You've made acquaintance with my cousin, young Mr. Patrick
+O'Donnell, I rejoice to hear.'
+
+'Yes, through his hearing or seeing my name and suspecting I had a
+sister,' said Mr. Colesworth, who was no longer in the resemblance of a
+gaping oyster on the borders of the ebb.  'The country is not disturbed.'
+
+'So the doctor thinks his patient is doing favourably!  And you cottoned
+to Patrick?  And I don't wonder.  Where was it?'
+
+'We met in Trieste.  He was about to start by one of the Austrian boats
+for the East.'
+
+'Not disturbed!  no!  with a rotten potato inside it paralysing
+digestion!' exclaimed Con.  'Now Patrick had been having a peep at
+Vienna, hadn't he?'
+
+'He had; he was fresh from Vienna when I met him.  As to Ireland, the
+harvest was only middling good last year.'
+
+'And that's the bit of luck we depend on.  A cloud too much, and it's
+drowned!  Had he seen, do you know, anybody in Vienna?--you were not long
+together at Trieste?'
+
+Mr. Colesworth had sufficient quickness to perceive that the two
+questions could be answered as one, and saying: 'He was disappointed,'
+revealed that he and Patrick had been long enough together to come to
+terms of intimacy.
+
+'To be sure, he gave you a letter of introduction to his family!' said
+Con.  'And permit me to add, that Patrick's choice of a friend is mine
+on trust.  The lady he was for seeing, Mr. Colesworth, was just then
+embarking on an adventure of a romantic character, particularly well
+suited to her nature, and the end of it was a trifle sanguinary, and
+she suffered a disappointment also, though not perhaps on that account.'
+
+'I heard of it in England last year,' said Mr. Colesworth.  'Did she come
+through it safely?'
+
+'Without any personal disfigurement: and is in England now, under her
+father's roof, meditating fresh adventures.'
+
+Kathleen cried: 'Ye 're talking of the lady who was Miss Adister--I can
+guess--Ah!' She humped her shoulders and sent a shudder up her neck.
+
+'But she's a grand creature, Mr. Colesworth, and you ought to know her,'
+said Con.  'That is, if you'd like to have an idea of a young Catherine
+or a Semiramisminus an army and a country.  There's nothing she's not
+capable of aiming at.  And there's pretty well nothing and nobody she
+wouldn't make use of.  She has great notions of the power of the British
+Press and the British purse--each in turn as a key to the other.  Now for
+an egg, Kathleen.'
+
+'I think I'll eat an egg,' Kathleen replied.
+
+'Bless the honey heart of the girl!  Life's in you, my dear, and calls
+for fuel.  I'm glad to see that Mr. Colesworth too can take a sight at
+the Sea-God after a night of him.  It augurs magnificently for a future
+career.  And let me tell you that the Pen demands it of us.  The first of
+the requisites is a stout stomach--before a furnished head!  I'd not pass
+a man to be anything of a writer who couldn't step ashore from a tempest
+and consume his Titan breakfast.'
+
+'We are qualifying for the literary craft, Miss O'Donnell,' said Mr.
+Colesworth.
+
+'It's for a walk in the wind up Caer Gybi, and along the coast I mean to
+go,' said Kathleen.
+
+'This morning?' the captain asked her.
+
+She saw his dilemma in his doubtful look.
+
+'When I've done.  While you're discussing matters with Father Boyle.
+I--know you're burning to.  Sure it's yourself knows as well as anybody,
+Captain Con, that I can walk a day long and take care of my steps.  I've
+walked the better half of Donegal alone, and this morning I'll have a
+protector.'
+
+Captain Con eyed the protector, approved of him, disapproved of himself,
+thought of Kathleen as a daughter of Erin--a privileged and inviolate
+order of woman in the minds of his countrymen--and wriggling internally
+over a remainder scruple said: 'Mr. Colesworth mayhap has to write a bit
+in the morning.'
+
+'I'm unattached at present,' the latter said.  'I am neither a
+correspondent nor a reporter, and if I were, the event would be wanting.'
+
+'That remark, sir, shows you to be eminently a stranger to the official
+duties,' observed the captain.  'Journalism is a maw, and the journalist
+has to cram it, and like anything else which perpetually distends for
+matter, it must be filled, for you can't leave it gaping, so when nature
+and circumstance won't combine to produce the stuff, we have recourse to
+the creative arts.  'Tis the necessity of the profession.'
+
+'The profession will not impose that necessity upon me,' remarked the
+young practitioner.
+
+'Outside the wheels of the machine, sir, we indulge our hallucination of
+immunity.  I've been one in the whirr of them, relating what I hadn't
+quite heard, and capitulating what I didn't think at all, in spite of the
+cry of my conscience--a poor infant below the waters, casting up
+ejaculatory bubbles of protestation.  And if it is my reproach that I
+left it to the perils of drowning, it's my pride that I continued to
+transmit air enough to carry on the struggle.  Not every journalist can
+say as much.  The Press is the voice of the mass, and our private opinion
+is detected as a discord by the mighty beast, and won't be endured by
+him.'
+
+'It's better not to think of him quite as a beast,' said Mr. Colesworth.
+
+'Infinitely better: and I like your "guile," sir: But wait and tell me
+what you think of him after tossing him his meat for a certain number of
+years.  There's Rockney.  Do you know Rockney?  He's the biggest single
+gun they've got, and he's mad for this country, but ask him about the
+public, you'll hear the menagerie-keeper's opinion of the brute that
+mauled his loins.'
+
+'Rockney,' said Mr. Colesworth, 'has the tone of a man disappointed of
+the dictatorship.'
+
+'Then you do know Rockney!' shouted Captain Con.  'That's the man in a
+neat bit of drawing.  He's a grand piece of ordnance.  But wait for him
+too, and tell me by and by.  If it isn't a woman, you'll find, that
+primes him, ay, and points him, and what's more, discharges him, I'm not
+Irish born.  Poor fellow!  I pity him.  He had a sweet Irish lady for his
+wife, and lost her last year, and has been raging astray politically ever
+since.  I suppose it's hardly the poor creature's fault.  None the less,
+you know, we have to fight him.  And now he 's nibbling at a bait--it 's
+fun: the lady I mentioned, with a turn for adventure and enterprise: it's
+rare fun: he 's nibbling, he'll be hooked.  You must make her
+acquaintance, Mr. Colesworth, and hold your own against her, if you can.
+She's a niece of my wife's and I'll introduce you.  I shall find her in
+London, or at our lodgings at a Surrey farm we've taken to nurse my
+cousin Captain Philip O'Donnell invalided from Indian awful climate!--
+on my return, when I hope to renew the acquaintance.  She has beauty,
+she has brains.  Resist her, and you 'll make a decent stand against
+Lucifer.  And supposing she rolls you up and pitches you over, her
+noticing you is a pretty compliment to your pen.  That 'll be consoling.'
+
+Mr. Colesworth fancied, he said, that he was proof against feminine
+blandishments in the direction of his writings.
+
+He spoke as one indicating a thread to suggest a cable.  The captain
+applauded the fancy as a pleasing delusion of the young sprigs of
+Journalism.
+
+Upon this, Mr. Colesworth, with all respect for French intelligence,
+denied the conclusiveness of French generalisations, which ascribed to
+women universal occult dominion, and traced all great affairs to small
+intrigues.
+
+The captain's eyes twinkled on him, thinking how readily he would back
+smart Miss Kathleen to do the trick, if need were.
+
+He said to her before she started: 'Don't forget he may be a clever
+fellow with that pen of his, and useful to our party.'
+
+'I'll not forget,' said she.
+
+For the good of his party, then, Captain Con permitted her to take the
+walk up Caer Gybi alone with Mr. Colesworth: a memorable walk in the
+recollections of the scribe, because of the wonderful likeness of the
+young lady to the breezy weather and the sparkles over the deep, the
+cloud that frowned, the cloud that glowed, the green of the earth
+greening out from under wings of shadow, the mountain ranges holding
+hands about an immensity of space.  It was one of our giant days to his
+emotions, and particularly memorable to him through the circumstance that
+it insisted on a record in verse, and he was unused to the fetters of
+metre: and although the verse was never seen by man, his attempt at it
+confused his ideas of his expressive powers.  Oddly too, while scourging
+the lines with criticism, he had a fondness for them: they stamped a
+radiant day in his mind, beyond the resources of rhetoric to have done it
+equally.
+
+This was the day of Captain Con's crossing the Rubicon between the secret
+of his happiness and a Parliamentary career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER
+
+Women may be able to tell you why the nursing of a military invalid
+awakens tenderer anxieties in their bosoms than those called forth by
+the drab civilian.  If we are under sentence of death we are all of us
+pathetic of course; but stretched upon the debateable couch of sickness
+we are not so touching as the coloured coat: it has the distinction
+belonging to colour.  It smites a deeper nerve, or more than one; and
+this, too, where there is no imaginary subjection to the charms of
+military glory, in minds to which the game of war is lurid as the plumes
+of the arch-slayer.
+
+Jane Mattock assisting Mrs. Adister O'Donnell to restore Captain Philip
+was very singularly affected, like a person shut off on a sudden from her
+former theories and feelings.  Theoretically she despised the soldier's
+work as much as she shrank abhorrently from bloodshed.  She regarded him
+and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and could peruse
+platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm.  The soldier personally, she
+was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence: a sort of schoolboy
+when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly limited creature, not
+a member of our broader world.  Without dismissing any of these views
+she found them put aside for the reception of others of an opposite
+character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to her cares of
+nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful, even
+prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for the
+country.  If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers, here was
+one whom it would be grievous to lose.  He had fallen for the country;
+and there was a moving story of how he had fallen.  She inclined to think
+more highly of him for having courted exposure on a miserable frontier
+war where but a poor sheaf of glory could be gathered.  And he seemed to
+estimate his professional duties apart from an aim at the laurels.  A
+conception of the possibility of a man's being both a soldier and morally
+a hero edged its way into her understanding.  It stood edgeways within,
+desirous of avoiding a challenge to show every feature.
+
+The cares of nursing were Jane's almost undividedly, except for the aid
+she had from her friend Grace Barrow and from Miss Colesworth.  Mrs.
+Adister O'Donnell was a nurse in name only.  'She'll be seen by Philip
+like as if she were a nightmare apparition of his undertaker's wraith,'
+Captain Con said to Jane, when recommending his cousin to her charitable
+nature, after he had taken lodgings at a farmhouse near Mrs. Lackstraw's
+model farm Woodside on the hills.  'Barring the dress,' as he added, some
+such impression of her frigid mournfulness might have struck a recumbent
+invalid.  Jane acknowledged it, and at first induced her aunt to join her
+in the daily walk of half a mile to sit with him.  Mrs. Lackstraw was a
+very busy lady at her farm; she was often summoned to London by her
+intuition of John's wish to have her presiding at table for the
+entertainment of his numerous guests; she confessed that she supervised
+the art of nursing better than she practised it, and supervision can be
+done at a distance if the subordinate is properly attentive to the rules
+we lay down, as Jane appeared to be.  So Jane was left to him.  She loved
+the country; Springtide in the country set her singing; her walk to her
+patient at Lappett's farm and homeward was an aethereal rapture for a
+heart rocking easy in fulness.  There was nothing to trouble it, no hint
+of wild winds and heavy seas, not even the familiar insinuation from the
+vigilant monitress, her aunt, to bid her be on her guard, beware of what
+it is that great heiresses are courted for, steel her heart against
+serpent speeches, see well to have the woman's precious word No at the
+sentinel's post, and alert there.  Mrs. Lackstraw, the most vigilant and
+plain-spoken of her sex, had forborne to utter the usual warnings which
+were to preserve Miss Mattock for her future Earl or Duke and the reason
+why she forbore was a double one; a soldier and Papist could never be
+thought perilous to a young woman scorning the sons of Mars and slaves
+of sacerdotalism.  The picture of Jane bestowing her hand on a Roman
+Catholic in military uniform, refused to be raised before the mind.
+Charitableness, humaneness, the fact that she was an admirable nurse and
+liked to exercise her natural gift, perfectly accounted for Jane's trips
+to Lappett's farm, and the jellies and fresh dairy dainties and neat
+little dishes she was constantly despatching to the place.  A suggestion
+of possible danger might prove more dangerous than silence, by rendering
+it attractive.  Besides, Jane talked of poor Captain Philip as Patrick
+O'Donnell's brother, whom she was bound to serve in return for Patrick's
+many services to her; and of how unlike Patrick he was.  Mrs. Lackstraw
+had been apprehensive about her fancy for Patrick.  Therefore if Captain
+Philip was unlike him, and strictly a Catholic, according to report, the
+suspicion of danger dispersed, and she was allowed to enjoy the pleasures
+of the metropolis as frequently as she chose.  The nursing of a man of
+Letters, or of the neighbour to him, a beggar in rags, would not have
+been so tolerated.  Thus we perceive that wits actively awake inside the
+ring-fence of prepossessions they have erected may lull themselves with
+their wakefulness.  Who would have thought!--is the cry when the
+strongest bulwark of the fence is broken through.
+
+Jane least of any would have thought what was coming to pass.  The pale
+square-browed young officer, so little Irish and winning in his brevity
+of speech, did and said nothing to alarm her or strike the smallest
+light.  Grace Barrow noticed certain little changes of mood in Jane she
+could scarcely have had a distinct suspicion at the time.  After a recent
+observation of him, on an evening stroll from Lappett's to Woodside, she
+pronounced him interesting, but hard.  'He has an interesting head . . .
+I should not like to offend him.' They agreed as to his unlikeness to
+fluid Patrick; both eulogistic of the absent brother; and Jane, who could
+be playful in privacy with friends, clapped a brogue on her tongue to
+discourse of Patrick and apostrophise him: 'Oh!  Pat, Pat, my dear cousin
+Pat! why are you so long away from your desponding Jane?  I 'll take to
+poetry and write songs, if you don't come home soon.  You've put seas
+between us, and are behaving to me as an enemy.  I know you 'll bring
+home a foreign Princess to break the heart of your faithful.  But I'll
+always praise you for a dear boy, Pat, and wish you happy, and beg the
+good gentleman your brother to give me a diploma as nurse to your first-
+born.  There now!'
+
+She finished smiling brightly, and Grace was a trifle astonished, for her
+friend's humour was not as a rule dramatic.
+
+'You really have caught a twang of it from your friend Captain Con; only
+you don't rattle the eighteenth letter of the alphabet in the middle of
+words.'
+
+'I've tried, and can't persuade my tongue to do it "first off," as boys
+say, and my invalid has no brogue whatever to keep me in practice,' Jane
+replied.  'One wonders what he thinks of as he lies there by the window.
+He doesn't confide it to his hospital nurse.'
+
+'Yes, he would treat her courteously, just in that military style,' said
+Grace, realising the hospital attendance.
+
+'It 's the style I like best:--no perpetual personal thankings and
+allusions to the trouble he gives!' Jane exclaimed.  'He shows perfect
+good sense, and I like that in all things, as you know.  A red-haired
+young woman chooses to wait on him and bring him flowers--he's brother
+to Patrick in his love of wild flowers, at all events!--and he takes it
+naturally and simply.  These officers bear illness well.  I suppose
+it 's the drill.'
+
+'Still I think it a horrid profession, dear.'
+
+Grace felt obliged to insist on that: and her 'I think,' though it was
+not stressed, tickled Jane's dormant ear to some drowsy wakefulness.
+
+'I think too much honour is paid to it, certainly.  But soldiers, of all
+men, one would expect to be overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness.  He has
+never complained; not once.  I doubt if he would have complained if Mrs.
+Adister had been waiting on him all the while, or not a soul.  I can
+imagine him lying on the battle-field night after night quietly,
+resolving not to groan.'
+
+'Too great a power of self-repression sometimes argues the want of any
+emotional nature,' said Grace.
+
+Jane shook her head.  She knew a story of him contradicting that.
+
+The story had not recurred to her since she had undertaken her service.
+It coloured the remainder of an evening walk home through the beechwoods
+and over the common with Grace, and her walk across the same tracks early
+in the morning, after Grace had gone to London.  Miss Colesworth was
+coming to her next week, with her brother if he had arrived in England.
+Jane remembered having once been curious about this adventurous man of
+Letters who lived by the work of his pen.  She remembered comparing him
+to one who was compelled to swim perpetually without a ship to give him
+rest or land in view.  He had made a little money by a book, and was
+expending it on travels--rather imprudently, she fancied Emma Colesworth
+to be thinking.  He talked well, but for the present she was happier in
+her prospect of nearly a week of loneliness.  The day was one of
+sunshine, windless, odorous: one of the rare placid days of April when
+the pettish month assumes a matronly air of summer and wears it till the
+end of the day.  The beech twigs were strongly embrowned, the larches
+shot up green spires by the borders of woods and on mounds within, deep
+ditchbanks unrolled profuse tangles of new blades, and sharp eyes might
+light on a late white violet overlooked by the children; primroses ran
+along the banks.  Jane had a maxim that flowers should be spared to live
+their life, especially flowers of the wilds; she had reared herself on
+our poets; hence Mrs. Lackstraw's dread of the arrival of one of the
+minstrel order: and the girl, who could deliberately cut a bouquet from
+the garden, if requested, would refuse to pluck a wildflower.  But now
+they cried out to her to be plucked in hosts, they claimed the sacrifice,
+and it seemed to her no violation of her sentiment to gather handfuls
+making a bunch that would have done honour to the procession of the
+children's May-day--a day she excused for the slaughter because her idol
+and prophet among the poets, wild nature's interpreter, was that day on
+the side of the children.  How like a bath of freshness would the thick
+faintly-fragrant mass shine to her patient!  Only to look at it was
+medicine!  She believed, in her lively healthfulness, that the look would
+give him a spring to health, and she hurried forward to have them in
+water-the next sacred obligation to the leaving of them untouched.
+
+She had reared herself on our poets.  If much brooding on them will
+sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that
+also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and as
+her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and
+accurate judgement, they rather tended to stamp her character than lead
+her into foolishness.  Blunt of speech, quick in sensibility,
+imaginative, yet idealistic, she had the complex character of diverse
+brain and nerve, and was often a problem to the chief person interested
+in it.  She thought so decisively, felt so shrinkingly; spoke so flatly,
+brooded so softly!  Such natures, in the painful effort to reconcile
+apparent antagonism and read themselves, forget that they are not full
+grown.  Longer than others are they young: but meanwhile they are of an
+age when we are driven abroad to seek and shape our destinies.
+
+Passing through the garden-gate of Lappett's farm she made her way to the
+south-western face of the house to beg a bowl of water of the farmer's
+wife, and had the sweet surprise of seeing her patient lying under
+swallows' eaves on a chair her brother had been commissioned to send
+from London for coming uses.  He was near the farm-wife's kitchen, but to
+windward of the cooking-reek, pleasantly warmed, sufficiently shaded, and
+alone, with open letter on the rug covering his legs.  He whistled to
+Jane's dog Wayland, a retriever, having Newfoundland relationships, of
+smithy redness and ruggedness; it was the whistle that startled her to
+turn and see him as she was in the act of handing Mrs. Lappett her
+primroses.
+
+'Out?  I feared it would be a week.  Is it quite prudent?'  Jane said,
+toning down her delight.
+
+He answered with the half-smile that refers these questions to the
+settled fact.  Air had always brought him round; now he could feel he
+was embarked for recovery: and he told her how the farmer and one of his
+men had lent a shoulder to present him to his old and surest physician--
+rather like a crippled ghost.  M. Adister was upstairs in bed with one of
+her headaches.  Captain Con, then, was attending her, Jane supposed: She
+spoke of him as the most devoted of husbands.
+
+A slight hardening of Philip's brows, well-known to her by this time,
+caused her to interrogate his eyes.  They were fixed on her in his manner
+of gazing with strong directness.  She read the contrary opinion, and
+some hieroglyphic matter besides.
+
+'We all respect him for his single-hearted care of her,' she said.
+'I have a great liking for him.  His tirades about the Saxon tyrant are
+not worth mentioning, they mean nothing.  He would be one of the first to
+rush to the standard if there were danger; I know he would.  He is truly
+chivalrous, I am sure.'
+
+Philip's broad look at her had not swerved.  The bowl of primroses placed
+beside him on a chair by the farmer's dame diverted it for a moment.
+
+'You gathered them?' he said.
+
+Jane drank his look at the flowers.
+
+'Yes, on my way,' she replied.  'We can none of us live for ever; and
+fresh water every day will keep them alive a good long time.  They had it
+from the clouds yesterday.  Do they not seem a bath of country
+happiness!'  Evidently they did their service in pleasing him.
+
+Seeing his fingers grope on the rug, she handed him his open letters.
+
+He selected the second, passing under his inspection, and asked her to
+read it.
+
+She took the letter, wondering a little that it should be in Captain
+Con's handwriting.
+
+'I am to read it through?' she said, after a run over some lines.
+
+He nodded.  She thought it a sign of his friendliness in sharing family
+secrets with her, and read:
+
+'MY DEAR PHILIP,--Not a word of these contents, which will be delivered
+seasonably to the lady chiefly concerned, by the proper person.  She
+hears this morning I 'm off on a hasty visit to Ireland, as I have been
+preparing her of late to expect I must, and yours the blame, if any,
+though I will be the last to fling it at you.  I meet Father B.  and
+pretty Kitty before I cross.  Judging by the wind this morning, the
+passage will furnish good schooling for a spell of the hustings.  But if
+I am in the nature of things unable to command the waves, trust me for
+holding a mob in leash; and they are tolerably alike.  My spirits are up.
+Now the die is cast.  My election to the vacancy must be reckoned
+beforehand.  I promise you a sounding report from the Kincora Herald.
+They will not say of me after that (and read only the speeches reported
+in the local paper) "what is the man but an Irish adventurer!"  He is a
+lover of his country, Philip O'Donnell, and one of millions, we will
+hope.  And that stigmatic title of long standing, more than anything
+earthly, drove him to the step-to the ruin of his domestic felicity
+perhaps.  But we are past sighing.
+
+'Think you, when he crossed the tide, Caius Julius Caesar sighed?
+
+'No, nor thought of his life, nor his wife, but of the thing to be done.
+Laugh, my boy!  I know what I am about when I set my mind on a powerful
+example.  As the chameleon gets his colour, we get our character from the
+objects we contemplate .  .  .'
+
+Jane glanced over the edge of the letter sheet rosily at Philip.
+
+His dryness in hitting the laughable point diverted her, and her mind
+became suffused with a series of pictures of the chameleon captain
+planted in view of the Roman to become a copy of him, so that she did not
+peruse the terminating lines with her wakefullest attention:
+
+'The liege lady of my heart will be the earliest to hail her hero
+triumphant, or cherish him beaten--which is not in the prospect.  Let
+Ireland be true to Ireland.  We will talk of the consolidation of the
+Union by and by.  You are for that, you say, when certain things are
+done; and you are where I leave you, on the highway, though seeming to go
+at a funeral pace to certain ceremonies leading to the union of the two
+countries in the solidest fashion, to their mutual benefit, after a
+shining example.  Con sleeps with a corner of the eye open, and you are
+not the only soldier who is a strategist, and a tactician too, aware of
+when it is best to be out of the way.  Now adieu and pax vobiscum.  Reap
+the rich harvest of your fall to earth.  I leave you in the charge of the
+kindest of nurses, next to the wife of my bosom the best of women.
+Appreciate her, sir, or perish in my esteem.  She is one whom not to
+love is to be guilty of an offence deserving capital punishment, and a
+bastinado to season the culprit for his execution.  Have I not often
+informed her myself that a flower from her hand means more than treasures
+from the hands of others.  Expect me absent for a week.  The harangues
+will not be closely reported.  I stand by the truth, which is my love of
+the land of my birth.  A wife must come second to that if she would be
+first in her husband's consideration.  Hurrah me on, Philip, now it is
+action, and let me fancy I hear you shouting it.'
+
+The drop of the letter to the signature fluttered affectionately on a
+number of cordial adjectives, like the airy bird to his home in the corn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+MARS CONVALESCENT
+
+Jane's face was clear as the sky when she handed the letter back to
+Philip.  In doing so, it struck her that the prolonged directness of his
+look was peculiar: she attributed it to some effect of the fresh Spring
+atmosphere on a weakened frame.  She was guessing at his reasons for
+showing her the letter, and they appeared possibly serious.
+
+'An election to Parliament!  Perhaps Mrs. Adister should have a hint of
+it, to soften the shock I fear it may be: but we must wait till her
+headache has passed,' she said.
+
+'You read to the end?' said Philip.
+
+'Yes, Captain Con always amuses me, and I am bound to confess I have no
+positive disrelish of his compliments.  But this may prove a desperate
+step.  The secret of his happiness is in extreme jeopardy.  Nothing would
+stop him, I suppose?'
+
+Philip signified that it was too late.  He was moreover of opinion, and
+stated it in his briefest, that it would be advisable to leave the
+unfolding of the present secret to the captain.
+
+Jane wondered why the letter had been shown.  Her patient might be
+annoyed and needing sympathy?
+
+'After all,' she said, 'Captain Con may turn out to be a very good sort
+of member of Parliament in his way.'
+
+Philip's eyebrows lifted, and he let fall a breath, eloquent of his
+thoughts.
+
+'My brother says he is a serviceable director of the Company they are
+associated in.'
+
+'He finds himself among reasonable men, and he is a chameleon.'
+
+'Parliament may steady him.'
+
+'It is too much of a platform for Con's head.'
+
+'Yes, there is more of poet than politician,' said she.  'That is a
+danger.  But he calls himself our friend; I think he really has a liking
+for John and me.'
+
+'For you he has a real love,' said Philip.
+
+'Well, then, he may listen to us at times; he may be trusted not to wound
+us.  I am unmitigatedly for the one country--no divisions.  We want all
+our strength in these days of monstrous armies directed by banditti
+Councils.  England is the nation of the Christian example to nations.
+Oh!  surely it is her aim.  At least she strives to be that.  I think it,
+and I see the many faults we have.'
+
+Her patient's eyelids were down.
+
+She proposed to send her name up to Mrs. Adister.
+
+On her return from the poor lady racked with headache and lying little
+conscious of her husband's powder-barrel under the bed, Jane found her
+patient being worried by his official nurse, a farm-labourer's wife, a
+bundle of a woman, whose lumbering assiduities he fenced with reiterated
+humourous negatives to every one of her propositions, until she prefaced
+the last two or three of the list with a 'Deary me!' addressed
+consolatorily to herself.  She went through the same forms each day,
+at the usual hours of the day, and Jane, though she would have felt the
+apathetic doltishness of the woman less, felt how hard it must be for him
+to bear.
+
+'Your sister will be with you soon,' she said.  'I am glad, and yet I
+hope you will not allow her to put me aside altogether?'
+
+'You shall do as you wish,' said Philip.
+
+'Is she like Patrick?  Her name is Kathleen, I know.'
+
+'She is a raw Irish girl, of good Irish training, but Irish.'
+
+'I hope she will be pleased with England.  Like Patrick in face, I mean.'
+
+'We think her a good-looking girl.'
+
+'Does she play?  sing?'
+
+'Some of our ballads.'
+
+'She will delight my brother.  John loves Irish ballads.'
+
+A silence of long duration fell between them.  She fancied he would like
+to sleep, and gently rose to slip away, that she might consult with Mrs.
+Lappett about putting up some tentcover.  He asked her if she was going.
+'Not home,' she said.  His hand moved, but stopped.  It seemed to have
+meant to detain her.  She looked at a white fleece that came across the
+sun, desiring to conjure it to stay and shadow him.  It sailed by.  She
+raised her parasol.
+
+His eyelids were shut, and she thought him asleep.  Meditating on her
+unanswered question of Miss Kathleen's likeness to Patrick, Jane imagined
+a possibly greater likeness to her patient, and that he did not speak of
+his family's exclamations on the subject because of Kathleen's being so
+good-looking a girl.  For if good-looking, a sister must resemble these
+handsome features here, quiescent to inspection in their marble outlines
+as a corse.  So might he lie on the battle-field, with no one to watch
+over him!
+
+While she watched, sitting close beside him to shield his head from the
+sunbeams, her heart began to throb before she well knew the secret of it.
+She had sight of a tear that grew big under the lashes of each of his
+eyelids, and rolled heavily.  Her own eyes overflowed.
+
+The fit of weeping was momentary, April's, a novelty with her.  She
+accused her silly visions of having softened her.  A hasty smoothing to
+right and left removed the traces; they were unseen; and when she
+ventured to look at him again there was no sign of fresh drops falling.
+His eyelids kept shut.
+
+The arrival of her diurnal basket of provisions offered a refreshing
+intervention of the commonplace.  Bright air had sharpened his appetite:
+he said he had been sure it would, and anticipated cheating the doctor of
+a part of the sentence which condemned him to lie on his back up to the
+middle of June, a log.  Jane was hungry too, and they feasted together
+gaily, talking of Kathleen on her journey, her strange impressions and
+her way of proclaiming them, and of Patrick and where he might be now;
+ultimately of Captain Con and Mrs. Adister.
+
+'He has broken faith with her,' Philip said sternly.  'She will have the
+right to tell him so.  He never can be anything but a comic politician.
+Still he was bound to consult his wife previous to stepping before the
+public.  He knows that he married a fortune.'
+
+'A good fortune,' said Jane.
+
+Philip acquiesced.  'She is an excellent woman, a model of uprightness;
+she has done him all the good in the world, and here is he deceiving her,
+lying--there is no other word: and one lie leads to another.  When he
+married a fortune he was a successful adventurer.  The compact was
+understood.  His duty as a man of honour is to be true to his bond and
+serve the lady.  Falseness to his position won't wash him clean of the
+title.'
+
+Jane pleaded for Captain Con.  'He is chivalrously attentive to her.'
+
+'You have read his letter,' Philip replied.
+
+He crushed her charitable apologies with references to the letter.
+
+'We are not certain that Mrs. Adister will object,' said she.
+
+'Do you see her reading a speech of her husband's?' he remarked.
+Presently with something like a moan:
+
+'And I am her guest!'
+
+'Oh!  pray, do not think Mrs. Adister will ever allow you to feel the
+lightest shadow .  .  .' said Jane.
+
+'No; that makes it worse.'
+
+Had this been the burden of his thoughts when those two solitary tears
+forced their passage?
+
+Hardly: not even in his physical weakness would he consent to weep for
+such a cause.
+
+'I forgot to mention that Mrs. Adister has a letter from her husband
+telling her he has been called over to Ireland on urgent business,' she
+said.
+
+Philip answered: 'He is punctilious.'
+
+'I wish indeed he had been more candid,' Jane assented to the sarcasm.
+
+'In Ireland he is agreeably surprised by the flattering proposal of a
+vacant seat, and not having an instant to debate on it, assumes the
+consent of the heavenliest wife in Christendom.'
+
+Philip delivered the speech with a partial imitation of Captain Con
+addressing his wife on his return as the elected among the pure Irish
+party.  The effort wearied him.
+
+She supposed he was regretting his cousin's public prominence in the
+ranks of the malcontents.  'He will listen to you,' she said, while she
+smiled at his unwonted display of mimicry.
+
+'A bad mentor for him.  Antics are harmless, though they get us laughed
+at,' said Philip.
+
+'You may restrain him from excesses.'
+
+'Were I in that position, you would consider me guilty of greater than
+any poor Con is likely to commit.'
+
+'Surely you are not for disunion?'
+
+'The reverse.  I am for union on juster terms, that will hold it fast.'
+
+'But what are the terms?'
+
+He must have desired to paint himself as black to her as possible.  He
+stated the terms, which were hardly less than the affrighting ones blown
+across the Irish sea by that fierce party.  He held them to be just,
+simply sensible terms.  True, he spoke of the granting them as a sure
+method to rally all Ireland to an ardent love of the British flag.  But
+he praised names of Irish leaders whom she had heard Mr. Rockney denounce
+for disloyal insolence: he could find excuses for them and their dupes--
+poor creatures, verily!  And his utterances had a shocking emphasis.
+Then she was not wrong in her idea of the conspirator's head, her first
+impression of him!
+
+She could not quit the theme: doing that would have been to be
+indifferent: something urged her to it.
+
+'Are they really your opinions?'
+
+He seemed relieved by declaring that they were.
+
+'Patrick is quite free of them,' said she.
+
+'We will hope that the Irish fever will spare Patrick.  He was at a
+Jesuit college in France when he was wax.  Now he's taking the world.'
+
+'With so little of the Jesuit in him!'
+
+'Little of the worst: a good deal of the best.'
+
+'What is the best?'
+
+'Their training to study.  They train you to concentrate the brain upon
+the object of study.  And they train you to accept service: they fit you
+for absolute service: they shape you for your duties in the world; and so
+long as they don't smelt a man's private conscience, they are model
+masters.  Happily Patrick has held his own.  Not the Jesuits would have
+a chance of keeping a grasp on Patrick!  He'll always be a natural boy
+and a thoughtful man.'
+
+Jane's features implied a gentle shudder.
+
+'I shake a scarlet cloak to you?' said Philip.
+
+She was directed by his words to think of the scarlet coat.  'I reflect a
+little on the substance of things as well,' she said.  'Would not
+Patrick's counsels have an influence?'
+
+'Hitherto our Patrick has never presumed to counsel his elder brother.'
+
+'But an officer wearing .  .  .'
+
+'The uniform!  That would have to be stripped off.  There'd be an end to
+any professional career.'
+
+'You would not regret it?'
+
+'No sorrow is like a soldier's bidding farewell to flag and comrades.
+Happily politics and I have no business together.  If the country favours
+me with active service I'm satisfied for myself.  You asked me for my
+opinions: I was bound to give them.  Generally I let them rest.'
+
+Could she have had the temerity?  Jane marvelled at herself.
+
+She doubted that the weighty pair of tears had dropped for the country.
+Captain Con would have shed them over Erin, and many of them.  Captain
+Philip's tone was too plain and positive: he would be a most practical
+unhistrionic rebel.
+
+'You would countenance a revolt?' she said, striking at that extreme to
+elicit the favourable answer her tones angled for.  And it was instantly:
+
+'Not in arms.' He tried an explanation by likening the dissension to a
+wrangle in a civilised family over an unjust division of property.
+
+And here, as he was marking the case with some nicety and difficulty,
+an itinerant barrel-organ crashed its tragic tale of music put to torture
+at the gate.  It yelled of London to Jane, throttled the spirits of the
+woods, threw a smoke over the country sky, befouled the pure air she
+loved.
+
+The instrument was one of the number which are packed to suit all English
+tastes and may be taken for a rough sample of the jumble of them, where a
+danceless quadrille-tune succeeds a suicidal Operatic melody and is
+followed by the weariful hymn, whose last drawl pert polka kicks aside.
+Thus does the poor Savoyard compel a rich people to pay for their wealth.
+Not without pathos in the abstract perhaps do the wretched machines
+pursue their revolutions of their factory life, as incapable of
+conceiving as of bestowing pleasure: a bald cry for pennies through the
+barest pretence to be agreeable but Jane found it hard to be tolerant of
+them out of London, and this one affecting her invalid and Mrs. Adister
+must be dismissed.  Wayland was growling; he had to be held by the
+collar.  He spied an objectionable animal.  A jerky monkey was attached
+to the organ; and his coat was red, his kepi was blue; his tailor had
+rigged him as a military gentleman.  Jane called to the farm-wife.
+Philip assured her he was not annoyed.  Jane observed him listening,
+and by degrees she distinguished a maundering of the Italian song she
+had one day sung to Patrick in his brother's presence.
+
+'I remember your singing that the week before I went to India,' said
+Philip, and her scarlet blush flooded her face.
+
+'Can you endure the noise?' she asked him.
+
+'Con would say it shrieks "murder."  But I used to like it once.'
+
+Mrs. Lappett came answering to the call.  Her children were seen up the
+garden setting to one another with squared aprons, responsive to a
+livelier measure.
+
+'Bless me, miss, we think it so cheerful!' cried Mrs. Lappett, and
+glanced at her young ones harmonious and out of mischief.
+
+'Very well,' said Jane, always considerate for children.  She had
+forgotten the racked Mrs. Adister.
+
+Now the hymn of Puritanical gloom-the peacemaker with Providence
+performing devotional exercises in black bile.  The leaps of the children
+were dashed.  A sallow two or three minutes composed their motions, and
+then they jumped again to the step for lively legs.  The similarity to
+the regimental band heading soldiers on the march from Church might have
+struck Philip.
+
+'I wonder when I shall see Patrick!' he said, quickened in spite of
+himself by the sham sounds of music to desire changes and surprises.
+
+Jane was wondering whether he could be a man still to brood tearfully
+over his old love.
+
+She echoed him.  'And I!  Soon, I hope.'
+
+The appearance of Mrs. Adister with features which were the acutest
+critical summary of the discord caused toll to be paid instantly, and
+they beheld a flashing of white teeth and heard Italian accents.  The
+monkey saluted militarily, but with painful suggestions of his foregone
+drilling in the ceremony.
+
+'We are safe nowhere from these intrusions,' Mrs. Adister said; 'not on
+these hills!--and it must be a trial for the wretched men to climb them,
+that thing on their backs.'
+
+'They are as accustomed to it as mountain smugglers bearing packs of
+contraband,' said Philip.
+
+'Con would have argued him out of hearing before he ground a second
+note,' she resumed.  'I have no idea when Con returns from his unexpected
+visit to Ireland.'
+
+'Within a fortnight, madam.'
+
+'Let me believe it!  You have heard from him?  But you are in the air!
+exposed!  My head makes me stupid.  It is now five o'clock.  The air
+begins to chill.  Con will never forgive me if you catch a cold, and I
+would not incur his blame.'
+
+The eyes of Jane and Philip shot an exchange.
+
+'Anything you command, madam,' said Philip.
+
+He looked up and breathed his heaven of fresh air.  Jane pitied, she
+could not interpose to thwart his act of resignation.  The farmer, home
+for tea, and a footman, took him between them, crutched, while Mrs.
+Adister said to Jane: 'The doctor's orders are positive:--if he is to be
+a man once more, he must rest his back and not use his legs for months.
+He was near to being a permanent cripple from that fall.  My brother
+Edward had one like it in his youth.  Soldiers are desperate creatures.'
+
+'I think Mr. Adister had his fall when hunting, was it not?' said Jane.
+
+'Hunting, my dear.'
+
+That was rather different from a fall on duty before the enemy, incurred
+by severe exhaustion after sunstroke!  .  .  .
+
+Jane took her leave of Philip beside his couch of imprisonment in his
+room, promising to return in the early morning.  He embraced her old dog
+Wayland tenderly.  Hard men have sometimes a warm affection for dogs.
+
+Walking homeward she likewise gave Wayland a hug.  She called him 'dear
+old fellow,' and questioned him of his fondness for her, warning him not
+to be faithless ever to the mistress who loved him.  Was not her old
+Wayland as good a protector as the footman Mrs. Adister pressed her to
+have at her heels?  That he was!
+
+Captain Con's behaviour grieved her.  And it certainly revived an ancient
+accusation against his countrymen.  If he cared for her so much, why had
+he not placed confidence in her and commissioned her to speak of his
+election to his wife?  Irishmen will never be quite sincere!--But why had
+his cousin exposed him to one whom he greatly esteemed?  However angry he
+might be with Con O'Donnell in his disapproval of the captain's conduct,
+it was not very considerate to show the poor man to her in his natural
+colours.  Those words: 'The consolidation of the Union:' sprang up.  She
+had a dim remembrance of words ensuing: 'ceremonies going at a funeral
+pace .  .  .  on the highway to the solidest kind of union:'--Yes, he
+wrote: 'I leave you to .  .  .' And Captain Philip showed her the letter:
+
+She perceived motives beginning to stir.  He must have had his intention:
+and now as to his character!--Jane was of the order of young women
+possessing active minds instead of figured paste-board fronts, who see
+what there is to be seen about them and know what may be known instead of
+decorously waiting for the astonishment of revelations.  As soon as she
+had asked herself the nature of the design of so honourable a man as
+Captain Philip in showing her his cousin's letter, her blood spun round
+and round, waving the reply as a torch; and the question of his character
+confirmed it.
+
+But could he be imagined seeking to put her on her guard?  There may be
+modesty in men well aware of their personal attractions: they can credit
+individual women with powers of resistance.  He was not vain to the
+degree which stupefies the sense of there being weight or wisdom in
+others.  And he was honour's own.  By these lights of his character she
+read the act.  His intention was .  .  .  and even while she saw it
+accurately, the moment of keen perception was overclouded by her innate
+distrust of her claim to feminine charms.  For why should he wish her
+to understand that he was no fortune-hunter and treated heiresses with
+greater reserve than ordinary women!  How could it matter to him?
+
+She saw the tears roll.  Tears of men sink plummet-deep; they find their
+level.  The tears of such a man have more of blood than of water in
+them.--What was she doing when they fell?  She was shading his head from
+the sun.  What, then, if those tears came of the repressed desire to
+thank her with some little warmth?  He was honour's own, and warmhearted
+Patrick talked of him as a friend whose heart was, his friend's.
+Thrilling to kindness, and, poor soul! helpless to escape it, he felt.
+perhaps that he had never thanked her, and could not.  He lay there,
+weak and tongue-tied: hence those two bright volumes of his condition
+of weakness.
+
+So the pursuit of the mystery ended, as it had commenced, in confusion,
+but of a milder sort and partially transparent at one or two of the gates
+she had touched.  A mind capable of seeing was twisted by a nature that
+would not allow of open eyes; yet the laden emotions of her nature
+brought her round by another channel to the stage neighbouring sight,
+where facts, dimly recognised for such--as they may be in truth, are
+accepted under their disguises, because disguise of them is needed by
+the bashful spirit which accuses itself of audaciousness in presuming to
+speculate.  Had she asked herself the reason of her extended speculation,
+her foot would not have stopped more abruptly on the edge of a torrent
+than she on that strange road of vapours and flying lights.  She did not;
+she sang, she sent her voice through the woods and took the splendid ring
+of it for an assurance of her peculiarly unshackled state.  She loved
+this liberty.  Of the men who had 'done her the honour,' not one had
+moved her to regret the refusal.  She lived in the hope of simply doing
+good, and could only give her hand to a man able to direct and help her;
+one who would bear to be matched with her brother.  Who was he?  Not
+discoverable; not likely to be.
+
+Therefore she had her freedom, an absolutely unflushed freedom, happier
+than poor Grace Barrow's.  Rumour spoke of Emma Colesworth having a wing
+clipped.  How is it that sensible women can be so susceptible?  For,
+thought Jane, the moment a woman is what is called in love, she can give
+her heart no longer to the innocent things about her; she is cut away
+from Nature: that pure well-water is tasteless to her.  To me it is wine!
+
+The drinking of the pure well-water as wine is among the fatal signs of
+fire in the cup, showing Nature at work rather to enchain the victim than
+bid her daughter go.  Jane of course meant the poet's 'Nature.' She did
+not reflect that the strong glow of poetic imagination is wanted to
+hallow a passionate devotion to the inanimate for this evokes the
+spiritual; and passionateness of any kind in narrower brains should be
+a proclamation to us of sanguine freshets not coming from a spiritual
+source.  But the heart betraying deluded her.  She fancied she had not
+ever been so wedded to Nature as on that walk through the bursting
+beechwoods, that sweet lonely walk, perfect in loneliness, where even a
+thought of a presence was thrust away as a desecration and images of
+souls in thought were shadowy.
+
+Her lust of freedom gave her the towering holiday.  She took the delirium
+in her own pure fashion, in a love of the bankside flowers and the downy
+edges of the young beech-buds fresh on the sprays.  And it was no unreal
+love, though too intent and forcible to win the spirit from the object.
+She paid for this indulgence of her mood by losing the spirit entirely.
+At night she was a spent rocket.  What had gone she could not tell: her
+very soul she almost feared.  Her glorious walk through the wood seemed
+burnt out.  She struck a light to try her poet on the shelf of the elect
+of earth by her bed, and she read, and read flatness.  Not his the fault!
+She revered him too deeply to lay it on him.  Whose was it?  She had a
+vision of the gulfs of bondage.
+
+Could it be possible that human persons were subject to the spells of
+persons with tastes, aims, practices, pursuits alien to theirs?  It was a
+riddle taxing her to solve it for the resistance to a monstrous iniquity
+of injustice, degrading her conception of our humanity.  She attacked it
+in the abstract, as a volunteer champion of our offended race.  And Oh!
+it could not be.  The battle was won without a blow.
+
+Thereupon came glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-
+enfolded, foreign; they were chapters of soft romance, appearing
+interminable, an endless mystery, an insatiable thirst for the mystery.
+She heard crashes of the opera-melody, and despising it even more than
+the wretched engine of the harshness, she was led by it, tyrannically led
+a captive, like the organ-monkey, until perforce she usurped the note,
+sounded the cloying tune through her frame, passed into the vulgar
+sugariness, lost herself.
+
+And saying to herself: This is what moves them!  she was moved.  One
+thrill of appreciation drew her on the tide, and once drawn from shore
+she became submerged.  Why am I not beautiful, was her thought.  Those
+voluptuous modulations of melting airs are the natural clothing of
+beautiful women.  Beautiful women may believe themselves beloved.
+They are privileged to believe, they are born with the faith.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A whisper of cajolery in season is often the secret
+Ah!  we're in the enemy's country now
+Beautiful women may believe themselves beloved
+Could peruse platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm
+Foamy top is offered and gulped as equivalent to an idea
+Hard men have sometimes a warm affection for dogs
+He was not alive for his own pleasure
+Hug the hatred they packed up among their bundles
+I baint done yet
+Irishmen will never be quite sincere
+Loudness of the interrogation precluded thought of an answer
+Love the children of Erin, when not fretted by them
+Loves his poets, can almost understand what poetry means
+May lull themselves with their wakefulness
+Never forget that old Ireland is weeping
+Not every chapter can be sunshine
+Not likely to be far behind curates in besieging an heiress
+Not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be
+Nursing of a military invalid awakens tenderer anxieties
+Paying compliments and spoiling a game!
+Secret of the art was his meaning what he said
+Suggestion of possible danger might more dangerous than silence
+Tears of men sink plummet-deep
+Tears of such a man have more of blood than of water in them
+They laugh, but they laugh extinguishingly
+Time, whose trick is to turn corners of unanticipated sharpness
+Twisted by a nature that would not allow of open eyes
+With death; we'd rather not, because of a qualm
+Woman's precious word No at the sentinel's post, and alert
+Would like to feel he was doing a bit of good
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4490 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Celt and Saxon, v2
+by George Meredith
+#96 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+
+Title: The Celt and Saxon, v2
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4490]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 5, 2002]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Celt and Saxon, v2, by George Meredith
+**********This file should be named 4490.txt or 4490.zip***********
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
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+may now be found at the end of this file.  Please read this
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+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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+
+
+
+
+CELT AND SAXON
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1910
+
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MISS MATTOCK
+
+Mrs. Adister O'Donnell, in common with her family, had an extreme dislike
+of the task of composing epistles, due to the circumstance that she was
+unable, unaided, to conceive an idea disconnected with the main theme of
+her communication, and regarded, as an art of conjuring, the use of words
+independent of ideas.  Her native superiority caused her to despise the
+art, but the necessity for employing it at intervals subjected her to
+fits of admiration of the conjurer, it being then evident that a
+serviceable piece of work, beyond her capacity to do, was lightly
+performed by another.  The lady's practical intelligence admitted the
+service, and at the same time her addiction to the practical provoked
+disdain of so flimsy a genius, which was identified by her with the
+genius of the Irish race.  If Irishmen had not been notoriously fighters,
+famous for their chivalry, she would have looked on them as a kind of
+footmen hired to talk and write, whose volubility might be encouraged
+and their affectionateness deserved by liberal wages.  The promptitude
+of Irish blood to deliver the war-cry either upon a glove flung down
+or taken up, raised them to a first place in her esteem: and she was
+a peaceful woman abhorring sanguinary contention; but it was in her
+own blood to love such a disposition against her principles.
+
+She led Patrick to her private room, where they both took seats and
+he selected a pen.  Mr. Patrick supposed that his business would be to
+listen and put her words to paper; a mechanical occupation permitting the
+indulgence of personal phantasies; and he was flying high on them until
+the extraordinary delicacy of the mind seeking to deliver itself forced
+him to prick up all his apprehensiveness.  She wished to convey that she
+was pleased with the news from Vienna, and desired her gratification to
+be imparted to her niece Caroline, yet not so as to be opposed to the
+peculiar feelings of her brother Edward, which had her fullest sympathy;
+and yet Caroline must by no means be requested to alter a sentence
+referring to Adiante, for that would commit her and the writer jointly to
+an insincerity.
+
+'It must be the whole truth, madam,' said Patrick, and he wrote: 'My dear
+Caroline,' to get the start.  At once a magnificently clear course for
+the complicated letter was distinguished by him.  'Can I write on and
+read it to you afterward?  I have the view,' he said.
+
+Mrs. Adister waved to him to write on.
+
+Patrick followed his 'My dear Caroline' with greetings very warm, founded
+on a report of her flourishing good looks.  The decision of Government to
+send reinforcements to Ireland was mentioned as a prelude to the
+information from Vienna of the birth of a son to the Princess Nikolas:
+and then; having conjoined the two entirely heterogeneous pieces of
+intelligence, the composer adroitly interfused them by a careless
+transposition of the prelude and the burden that enabled him to play ad
+libitum on regrets and rejoicings; by which device the lord of Earlsfont
+might be offered condolences while the lady could express her strong
+contentment, inasmuch as he deplored the state of affairs in the sister
+island, and she was glad of a crisis concluding a term of suspense thus
+the foreign-born baby was denounced and welcomed, the circumstances
+lamented and the mother congratulated, in a breath, all under cover of
+the happiest misunderstanding, as effective as the cabalism of Prospero's
+wand among the Neapolitan mariners, by the skilful Irish development on a
+grand scale of the rhetorical figure anastrophe, or a turning about and
+about.
+
+He read it out to her, enjoying his composition and pleased with his
+reconcilement of differences.  'So you say what you feel yourself, madam,
+and allow for the feelings on the other side,' he remarked.  'Shall I
+fold it?
+
+There was a smoothness in the letter particularly agreeable to her
+troubled wits, but with an awful taste.  She hesitated to assent: it
+seemed like a drug that she was offered.
+
+Patrick sketched a series of hooked noses on the blotter.  He heard a
+lady's name announced at the door, and glancing up from his work he
+beheld a fiery vision.
+
+Mrs. Adister addressed her affectionately: 'My dear Jane!' Patrick was
+introduced to Miss Mattock.
+
+His first impression was that the young lady could wrestle with him and
+render it doubtful of his keeping his legs.  He was next engaged in
+imagining that she would certainly burn and be a light in the dark.
+Afterwards he discovered her feelings to be delicate, her looks pleasant.
+Thereupon came one of the most singular sensations he had ever known: he
+felt that he was unable to see the way to please her.  She confirmed it
+by her remarks and manner of speaking.  Apparently she was conducting a
+business.
+
+'You're right, my dear Mrs. Adister, I'm on my way to the Laundry, and I
+called to get Captain Con to drive there with me and worry the manageress
+about the linen they turn out: for gentlemen are complaining of their
+shirt-fronts, and if we get a bad name with them it will ruin us.  Women
+will listen to a man.  I hear he has gone down to the city.  I must go
+and do it alone.  Our accounts are flourishing, I'm glad to say, though
+we cannot yet afford to pay for a secretary, and we want one.  John and I
+verified them last night.  We're aiming at steam, you know.  In three or
+four years we may found a steam laundry on our accumulated capital.  If
+only we can establish it on a scale to let us give employment to at least
+as many women as we have working now!  That is what I want to hear of.
+But if we wait for a great rival steam laundry to start ahead of us, we
+shall be beaten and have to depend on the charitable sentiments of rich
+people to support the Institution.  And that won't do.  So it's a serious
+question with us to think of taking the initiative: for steam must come.
+It 's a scandal every day that it doesn't while we have coal.  I'm for
+grand measures.  At the same time we must not be imprudent: turning off
+hands, even temporarily, that have to feed infants, would be quite
+against my policy.'
+
+Her age struck Patrick as being about twenty-three.
+
+'Could my nephew Arthur be of any use to you?' said Mrs. Adister.
+
+'Colonel Adister?' Miss Mattock shook her head.  'No.'
+
+'Arthur can be very energetic when he takes up a thing.' 'Can he?  But,
+Mrs. Adister, you are looking a little troubled.  Sometimes you confide
+in me.  You are so good to us with your subscriptions that I always feel
+in your debt.'
+
+Patrick glanced at his hostess for a signal to rise and depart.
+
+She gave none, but at once unfolded her perplexity, and requested Miss
+Mattock to peruse the composition of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell and deliver an
+opinion upon it.
+
+The young lady took the letter without noticing its author.  She read it
+through, handed it back, and sat with her opinion evidently formed
+within.
+
+'What do you think of it?' she was asked.
+
+'Rank jesuitry,' she replied.
+
+'I feared so!' sighed Mrs. Adister.  'Yet it says everything I wish to
+have said.  It spares my brother and it does not belie me.  The effect of
+a letter is often most important.  I cannot but consider this letter very
+ingenious.  But the moment I hear it is jesuitical I forswear it.  But
+then my dilemma remains.  I cannot consent to give pain to my brother
+Edward: nor will I speak an untruth, though it be to save him from a
+wound.  I am indeed troubled.  Mr. Patrick, I cannot consent to despatch
+a jesuitical letter.  You are sure of your impression, my dear Jane?'
+
+'Perfectly,' said Miss Mattock.
+
+Patrick leaned to her.  'But if the idea in the mind of the person
+supposed to be writing the letter is accurately expressed?  Does it
+matter, if we call it jesuitical, if the emotion at work behind it
+happens to be a trifle so, according to your definition?'
+
+She rejoined: 'I should say, distinctly it matters.'
+
+'Then you'd not express the emotions at all?'
+
+He flashed a comical look of astonishment as he spoke.  She was not to be
+diverted; she settled into antagonism.
+
+'I should write what I felt.'
+
+'But it might be like discharging a bullet.'
+
+'How?'
+
+'If your writing in that way wounded the receiver.'
+
+'Of course I should endeavour not to wound!'
+
+'And there the bit of jesuitry begins.  And it's innocent while it 's no
+worse than an effort to do a disagreeable thing as delicately as you
+can.'
+
+She shrugged as delicately as she could:
+
+'We cannot possibly please everybody in life.'
+
+'No: only we may spare them a shock: mayn't we?'
+
+'Sophistries of any description, I detest.'
+
+'But sometimes you smile to please, don't you?'
+
+'Do you detect falseness in that?' she answered, after the demurest of
+pauses.
+
+'No: but isn't there a soupcon of sophistry in it?'
+
+'I should say that it comes under the title of common civility.'
+
+'And on occasion a little extra civility is permitted!'
+
+'Perhaps: when we are not seeking a personal advantage.'
+
+'On behalf of the Steam Laundry?'
+
+Miss Mattock grew restless: she was too serious in defending her position
+to submit to laugh, and his goodhumoured face forbade her taking offence.
+
+'Well, perhaps, for that is in the interest of others.'
+
+'In the interests of poor and helpless females.  And I agree with you
+with all my heart.  But you would not be so considerate for the sore
+feelings of a father hearing what he hates to hear as to write a
+roundabout word to soften bad news to him?'
+
+She sought refuge in the reply that nothing excused jesuitry.
+
+'Except the necessities of civilisation,' said Patrick.
+
+'Politeness is one thing,' she remarked pointedly.
+
+'And domestic politeness is quite as needful as popular, you'll admit.
+And what more have we done in the letter than to be guilty of that?  And
+people declare it's rarer: as if we were to be shut up in families to
+tread on one another's corns!  Dear me!  and after a time we should be
+having rank jesuitry advertised as the specific balsam for an unhappy
+domesticated population treading with hard heels from desperate habit and
+not the slightest intention to wound.'
+
+'My dear Jane,' Mrs. Adister interposed while the young lady sat between
+mildly staring and blinking, 'you have, though still of a tender age, so
+excellent a head that I could trust to your counsel blindfolded.  It is
+really deep concern for my brother.  I am also strongly in sympathy with
+my niece, the princess, that beautiful Adiante: and my conscience
+declines to let me say that I am not.'
+
+'We might perhaps presume to beg for Miss Mattock's assistance in the
+composition of a second letter more to her taste,' Patrick said slyly.
+
+The effect was prompt: she sprang from her seat.
+
+'Dear Mrs. Adister!  I leave it to you.  I am certain you and Mr.
+O'Donnell know best.  It's too difficult and delicate for me.  I am
+horribly blunt.  Forgive me if I seemed to pretend to casuistry.  I am
+sure I had no such meaning.  I said what I thought.  I always do.  I
+never meant that it was not a very clever letter; and if it does exactly
+what you require it should be satisfactory.  To-morrow evening John and I
+dine with you, and I look forward to plenty of controversy and amusement.
+At present I have only a head for work.'
+
+'I wish I had that,' said Patrick devoutly.
+
+She dropped her eyes on him, but without letting him perceive that he was
+a step nearer to the point of pleasing her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+OF ROCKNEY
+
+Battles have been won and the streams of History diverted to new channels
+in the space of ten minutes. Ladies have been won, a fresh posterity
+founded, and grand financial schemes devised, revolts arranged, a yoke
+shaken off, in less of mortal time.  Excepting an inspired Epic song and
+an original Theory of the Heavens, almost anything noteworthy may be
+accomplished while old Father Scythe is taking a trot round a courtyard;
+and those reservations should allow the splendid conception to pass for
+the performance, when we bring to mind that the conception is the
+essential part of it, as a bard poorly known to fame was constantly
+urging.  Captain Con had blown his Epic bubbles, not to speak of his
+projected tuneful narrative of the adventures of the great Cuchullin, and
+his Preaching of St. Patrick, and other national triumphs.  He could own,
+however, that the world had a right to the inspection of the Epic books
+before it awarded him his crown.  The celestial Theory likewise would
+have to be worked out to the last figure by the illustrious astronomers
+to whom he modestly ranked himself second as a benefactor of his kind,
+revering him.  So that, whatever we may think in our own hearts, Epic and
+Theory have to remain the exception. Battles indeed have been fought, but
+when you survey the field in preparation for them you are summoned to
+observe the preluding courtesies of civilised warfare in a manner
+becoming a chivalrous gentleman.  It never was the merely flinging of
+your leg across a frontier, not even with the abrupt Napoleon.  You have
+besides to drill your men; and you have often to rouse your foe with a
+ringing slap, if he's a sleepy one or shamming sleepiness.  As here, for
+example: and that of itself devours more minutes than ten.  Rockney and
+Mattock could be roused; but these English, slow to kindle, can't subside
+in a twinkling; they are for preaching on when they have once begun;
+betray the past engagement, and the ladies are chilled, and your wife
+puts you the pungent question: 'Did you avoid politics, Con?' in the
+awful solitude of domestic life after a party.  Now, if only there had
+been freedom of discourse during the dinner hour, the ten disembarrassed
+minutes allotted to close it would have afforded time sufficient for
+hearty finishing blows and a soothing word or so to dear old innocent Mr.
+Rumford, and perhaps a kindly clap of the shoulder to John Mattock, no
+bad fellow at bottom.  Rockney too was no bad fellow in his way.  He
+wanted no more than a beating and a thrashing.  He was a journalist, a
+hard-headed rascal, none of your good old-fashioned order of regimental
+scribes who take their cue from their colonel, and march this way and
+that, right about face, with as little impediment of principles to hamper
+their twists and turns as the straw he tosses aloft at midnight to spy
+the drift of the wind to-morrow.  Quite the contrary; Rockney was his
+own colonel; he pretended to think independently, and tried to be the
+statesman of a leading article, and showed his intention to stem the
+current of liberty, and was entirely deficient in sympathy with the
+oppressed, a fanatical advocate of force; he was an inveterate Saxon,
+good-hearted and in great need of a drubbing.  Certain lines Rockney had
+written of late about Irish affairs recurred to Captain Con, and the
+political fires leaped in him; he sparkled and said: 'Let me beg you to
+pass the claret over to Mr. Rockney, Mr. Rumford; I warrant it for the
+circulating medium of amity, if he'll try it.'
+
+"Tis the Comet Margaux,' said Dr. Forbery, topping anything Rockney might
+have had to say, and anything would have served.  The latter clasped the
+decanter, poured and drank in silence.
+
+''Tis the doctor's antidote, and best for being antedated,' Captain Con
+rapped his friend's knuckles.
+
+'As long as you're contented with not dating in double numbers,' retorted
+the doctor, absolutely scattering the precious minutes to the winds, for
+he hated a provocation.
+
+'There's a golden mean, is there!'
+
+'There is; there's a way between magnums of good wine and gout, and it's
+generally discovered too late.'
+
+'At the physician's door, then! where the golden mean is generally
+discovered to be his fee.  I've heard of poor souls packed off by him
+without an obolus to cross the ferry.  Stripped they were in all
+conscience.'
+
+'You remind me of a fellow in Dublin who called on me for medical advice,
+and found he'd forgotten his purse.  He offered to execute a deed to
+bequeath me his body, naked and not ashamed.'
+
+'You'd a right to cut him up at once, Forbery.  Any Jury 'd have
+pronounced him guilty of giving up the ghost before he called.'
+
+'I let him go, body and all.  I never saw him again.'
+
+'The fellow was not a lunatic.  As for your golden mean, there's a
+saying: Prevention is better than cure: and another that caps it: Drink
+deep or taste not.'
+
+'That's the Pierian Spring.'
+
+'And what is the wine on my table, sir?'
+
+'Exhaustless if your verses come of it.'
+
+'And pure, you may say of the verses and the fount.'
+
+'And neither heady nor over-composed; with a blush like Diana confessing
+her love for the young shepherd: it's one of your own comparisons.'
+
+'Oh!' Con could have roared his own comparisons out of hearing.  He was
+angry with Forbery for his obstructive dulness and would not taste the
+sneaking compliment.  What could Forbery mean by paying compliments and
+spoiling a game!  The ten minutes were dancing away like harmless wood-
+nymphs when the Satyr slumbers.  His eyes ranged over his guests
+despondently, and fixed in desperation on Mr. Rumford, whom his
+magnanimous nature would have spared but for the sharp necessity to
+sacrifice him.
+
+The wine in Rumford at any rate let loose his original nature, if it
+failed to unlock the animal in these other unexcitable Saxons.
+
+'By the way, now I think of it, Mr. Rumford, the interpretation of your
+Royal Standard, which perplexes you so much, strikes me as easy if you
+'ll examine the powerfully different colours of the two beasts in it.'
+
+Mr. Rumford protested that he had abandoned his inquiry: it was a piece
+of foolishness: he had no feeling in it whatever, none.
+
+The man was a perfect snail's horn for coyness.
+
+The circumstances did not permit of his being suffered to slip away: and
+his complexion showed that he might already be classed among the roast.
+
+'Your Lion:--Mr. Rumford, you should know, is discomposed, as a
+thoughtful patriot, by the inexplicable presence of the Unicorn in the
+Royal Standard, and would be glad to account for his one horn and the
+sickly appearance of the beast.  I'm prepared to say he's there to
+represent the fair one half of the population.
+
+Your Lion, my dear sir, may have nothing in his head, but his tawniness
+tells us he imbibes good sound stuff, worthy of the reputation of a noble
+brewery.  Whereas your, Unicorn, true to the character of the numberless
+hosts he stands for, is manifestly a consumer of doctor's drugs.  And
+there you have the symbolism of your country.  Right or left of the
+shield, I forget which, and it is of no importance to the point--you have
+Grandgosier or Great Turk in all his majesty, mane and tail; and on the
+other hand, you behold, as the showman says, Dyspepsia.  And the pair are
+intended to indicate that you may see yourselves complete by looking at
+them separately; and so your Royal Standard is your national mirror; and
+when you gaze on it fondly you're playing the part of a certain Mr.
+Narcissus, who got liker to the Lion than to the Unicorn in the act.  Now
+will that satisfy you?'
+
+'Quite as you please, quite as you please,' Mr. Rumford replied.
+'One loves the banner of one's country--that is all.' He rubbed his
+hands.  'I for one am proud of it.'
+
+'Far be it from me to blame you, my dear sir.  Or there's the alternative
+of taking him to stand for your sole great festival holiday, and
+worshipping him as the personification of your Derbyshire race.'
+
+A glittering look was in Captain Con's eye to catch Rockney if he would
+but rise to it.
+
+That doughty Saxon had been half listening, half chatting to Mr. Mattock,
+and wore on his drawn eyelids and slightly drawn upper lip a look of
+lambent pugnacity awake to the challenge, indifferent to the antagonist,
+and disdainful of the occasion.
+
+'We have too little of your enthusiasm for the flag,' Philip said to Mr.
+Rumford to soothe him, in a form of apology for his relative.
+
+'Surely no! not in England?' said Mr. Rumford, tempted to open his heart,
+for he could be a bellicose gentleman by deputy of the flag.  He
+recollected that the speaker was a cousin of Captain Con's, and withdrew
+into his wound for safety.  'Here and there, perhaps; not when we are
+roused; we want rousing, we greatly prefer to live at peace with the
+world, if the world will let us.'
+
+'Not at any price?' Philip fancied his tone too quakerly.
+
+'Indeed I am not one of that party!' said Mr. Rumford, beginning to glow;
+but he feared a snare, and his wound drew him in again.
+
+'When are you ever at peace!' quoth his host, shocked by the
+inconsiderate punctuality of Mrs. Adister O'Donnell's household, for here
+was the coffee coming round, and Mattock and Rockney escaping without a
+scratch.  'There's hardly a day in the year when your scarlet mercenaries
+are not popping at niggers.'
+
+Rockney had the flick on the cheek to his manhood now, it might be hoped.
+
+'Our what?' asked Mr. Rumford, honestly unable to digest the opprobrious
+term.
+
+'Paid soldiery, hirelings, executioners, whom you call volunteers, by a
+charming euphemism, and send abroad to do the work of war while you
+propound the doctrines of peace at home.'
+
+Rockney's forehead was exquisitely eruptive, red and swelling.  Mattock
+lurched on his chair.  The wine was in them, and the captain commended
+the spiriting of it, as Prospero his Ariel.
+
+Who should intervene at this instant but the wretched Philip, pricked on
+the point of honour as a soldier!  Are we inevitably to be thwarted by
+our own people?
+
+'I suppose we all work for pay,' said he.  'It seems to me a cry of the
+streets to call us by hard names.  The question is what we fight for.'
+
+He spoke with a witless moderation that was most irritating, considering
+the latest news from the old country.
+
+'You fight to subjugate, to enslave,' said Con, 'that's what you're
+doing, and at the same time your journals are venting their fine irony
+at the Austrians and the Russians and the Prussians for tearing Poland to
+strips with their bloody beaks.'
+
+'We obey our orders, and leave you to settle the political business,'
+Philip replied.
+
+Forbery declined the fray.  Patrick was eagerly watchful and dumb.
+Rockney finished his coffee with a rap of the cup in the saucer, an
+appeal for the close of the sitting; and as Dr. Forbery responded to it
+by pushing back his chair, he did likewise, and the other made a
+movement.
+
+The disappointed hero of a fight unfought had to give the signal for
+rising.  Double the number of the ten minutes had elapsed.  He sprang up,
+hearing Rockney say: 'Captain Con O'Donnell is a politician or nothing,'
+and as he was the most placable of men concerning his personality, he
+took it lightly, with half a groan that it had not come earlier, and
+said, 'He thinks and he feels, poor fellow!'
+
+All hope of a general action was over.
+
+'That shall pass for the epitaph of the living,' said Rockney.
+
+It was too late to catch at a trifle to strain it to a tussle.  Con was
+obliged to subjoin: 'Inscribe it on the dungeon-door of tyranny.' But the
+note was peaceful.
+
+He expressed a wish that the fog had cleared for him to see the stars of
+heaven before he went to bed, informing Mr. Mattock that a long look in
+among them was often his prayer at night, and winter a holy season to
+him, for the reason of its showing them bigger and brighter.
+
+'I can tell my wife with a conscience we've had a quiet evening, and
+you're a witness to it,' he said to Patrick.  That consolation remained.
+
+'You know the secret of your happiness,' Patrick answered.
+
+'Know you one of the secrets of a young man's fortune in life, and give
+us a thrilling song at the piano, my son,' said Con: 'though we don't
+happen to have much choice of virgins for ye to-night.  Irish or French.
+Irish are popular.  They don't mind having us musically.  And if we'd go
+on joking to the end we should content them, if only by justifying their
+opinion that we're born buffoons.'
+
+His happy conscience enabled him to court his wife with assiduity and
+winsomeness, and the ladies were once more elated by seeing how
+chivalrously lover-like an Irish gentleman can be after years of wedlock.
+
+Patrick was asked to sing.  Miss Mattock accompanied him at the piano.
+Then he took her place on the music-stool, and she sang, and with an
+electrifying splendour of tone and style.
+
+'But it's the very heart of an Italian you sing with!' he cried.
+
+'It will surprise you perhaps to hear that I prefer German music,' said
+she.
+
+'But where--who had the honour of boasting you his pupil?'
+
+She mentioned a famous master.  Patrick had heard of him in Paris.  He
+begged for another song and she complied, accepting the one he selected
+as the favourite of his brother Philip's, though she said: 'That one?'
+with a superior air.  It was a mellifluous love-song from a popular
+Opera somewhat out of date.  'Well, it's in Italian!' she summed up her
+impressions of the sickly words while scanning them for delivery.
+She had no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer, she
+confessed, yet she sang as if possessed by him.  Had she, Patrick
+thought, been bent upon charming Philip, she could not have thrown more
+fire into the notes.  And when she had done, after thrilling the room,
+there was a gesture in her dismissal of the leaves displaying critical
+loftiness.  Patrick noticed it and said, with the thrill of her voice
+lingering in him: 'What is it you do like?  I should so like to know.'
+
+She was answering when Captain Con came up to the piano and remarked in
+an undertone to Patrick: 'How is it you hit on the song Adiante Adister
+used to sing?'
+
+Miss Mattock glanced at Philip.  He had applauded her mechanically,
+and it was not that circumstance which caused the second rush of scarlet
+over her face.  This time she could track it definitely to its origin.
+A lover's favourite song is one that has been sung by his love.  She
+detected herself now in the full apprehension of the fact before she had
+sung a bar: it had been a very dim fancy: and she denounced herself
+guilty of the knowledge that she was giving pain by singing the stuff
+fervidly, in the same breath that accused her of never feeling things at
+the right moment vividly.  The reminiscences of those pale intuitions
+made them always affectingly vivid.
+
+But what vanity in our emotional state in a great jarring world where we
+are excused for continuing to seek our individual happiness only if we
+ally it and subordinate it to the well being of our fellows!  The
+interjection was her customary specific for the cure of these little
+tricks of her blood.  Leaving her friend Miss Barrow at the piano, she
+took a chair in a corner and said; 'Now, Mr. O'Donnell, you will hear the
+music that moves me.'
+
+'But it's not to be singing,' said Patrick.  'And how can you sing so
+gloriously what you don't care for?  It puzzles me completely.'
+
+She assured him she was no enigma: she hushed to him to hear.
+
+He dropped his underlip, keeping on the conversation with his eyes until
+he was caught by the masterly playing of a sonata by the chief of the
+poets of sound.
+
+He was caught by it, but he took the close of the introductory section,
+an allegro con brio, for the end, and she had to hush at him again, and
+could not resist smiling at her lullaby to the prattler.  Patrick smiled
+in response.  Exchanges of smiles upon an early acquaintance between two
+young people are peeps through the doorway of intimacy.  She lost sight
+of the Jesuit.  Under the influence of good music, too, a not
+unfavourable inclination towards the person sitting beside us and sharing
+that sweetness, will soften general prejudices--if he was Irish, he was
+boyishly Irish, not like his inscrutable brother; a better, or hopefuller
+edition of Captain Con; one with whom something could be done to steady
+him, direct him, improve him.  He might be taught to appreciate Beethoven
+and work for his fellows.  'Now does not that touch you more deeply than
+the Italian?' said she, delicately mouthing: 'I, mio tradito amor!'
+
+'Touch, I don't know,' he was honest enough to reply.  'It's you that
+haven't given it a fair chance I'd like to hear it again.  There's a
+forest on fire in it.'
+
+'There is,' she exclaimed.  'I have often felt it, but never seen it.
+You exactly describe it.  How true!'
+
+'But any music I could listen to all day and all the night,' said he.
+
+'And be as proud of yourself the next morning?'
+
+Patrick was rather at sea.  What could she mean?
+
+Mrs. Adister O'Donnell stepped over to them, with the object of
+installing Colonel Adister in Patrick's place.
+
+The object was possibly perceived.  Mrs. Adister was allowed no time to
+set the manoeuvre in motion.
+
+'Mr. O'Donnell is a great enthusiast for music, and could listen to it
+all day and all night, he tells me,' said Miss Mattock.  'Would he not
+sicken of it in a week, Mrs. Adister?'
+
+'But why should I?' cried Patrick.  'It's a gift of heaven.'
+
+'And, like other gifts of heaven, to the idle it would turn to evil.'
+
+'I can't believe it.'
+
+'Work, and you will believe it.'
+
+'But, Miss Mattock, I want to work; I'm empty-handed.  It 's true I want
+to travel and see a bit of the world to help me in my work by and by.
+I'm ready to try anything I can do, though.'
+
+'Has it ever struck you that you might try to help the poor?'
+
+'Arthur is really anxious, and only doubts his ability,' said Mrs.
+Adister.
+
+'The doubt throws a shadow on the wish,' said Miss Mattock.  'And can one
+picture Colonel Adister the secretary of a Laundry Institution, receiving
+directions from Grace and me!  We should have to release him long before
+the six months' term, when we have resolved to incur the expense of a
+salaried secretary.'
+
+Mrs. Adister turned her head to the colonel, who was then looking down
+the features of Mrs. Rockney.
+
+Patrick said: 'I'm ready, for a year, Miss Mattock.'
+
+She answered him, half jocosely: 'A whole year of free service?  Reflect
+on what you are undertaking.'
+
+'It's writing and accounts, no worse?'
+
+'Writing and accounts all day, and music in the evening only now and
+then.'
+
+'I can do it: I will, if you'll have me.'
+
+'Do you hear Mr. O'Donnell, Mrs. Adister?'
+
+Captain Con fluttered up to his wife, and heard the story from Miss
+Mattock.
+
+He fancied he saw a thread of good luck for Philip in it.  'Our house
+could be Patrick's home capitally,' he suggested to his wife.  She was
+not a whit less hospitable, only hinting that she thought the refusal of
+the post was due to Arthur.
+
+'And if he accepts, imagine him on a stool, my dear madam; he couldn't
+sit it!'
+
+Miss Mattock laughed.  'No, that is not to be thought of seriously.  And
+with Mr. O'Donnell it would be probationary for the first fortnight or
+month.  Does he know anything about steam?'
+
+'The rudimentary idea,' said Patrick.
+
+'That's good for a beginning,' said the captain; and he added: 'Miss
+Mattock, I'm proud if one of my family can be reckoned worthy of
+assisting in your noble work.'
+
+She replied: 'I warn everybody that they shall be taken at their word if
+they volunteer their services.'
+
+She was bidden to know by the captain that the word of an Irish gentleman
+was his bond.  'And not later than to-morrow evening I'll land him at
+your office.  Besides, he'll find countrywomen of his among you, and
+there's that to enliven him.  You say they work well, diligently,
+intelligently.'
+
+She deliberated.  'Yes, on the whole; when they take to their work.
+Intelligently certainly compared with our English.  We do not get the
+best of them in London.  For that matter, we do not get the best of the
+English--not the women of the north.  We have to put up with the rejected
+of other and better-paying departments of work.  It breaks my heart
+sometimes to see how near they are to doing well, but for such a little
+want of ballast.'
+
+'If they're Irish,' said Patrick, excited by the breaking of her heart,
+'a whisper of cajolery in season is often the secret.'
+
+Captain Con backed him for diplomacy.  'You'll learn he has a head, Miss
+Mattock.'
+
+'I am myself naturally blunt, and prefer the straightforward method,'
+said she.
+
+Patrick nodded.  'But where there's an obstruction in the road, it's
+permissible to turn a corner.'
+
+'Take 'em in flank when you can't break their centre,' said Con.
+
+'Well, you shall really try whether you can endure the work for a short
+time if you are in earnest,' Miss Mattock addressed the volunteer.
+
+'But I am,' he said.
+
+'We are too poor at present to refuse the smallest help.'
+
+'And mine is about the smallest.'
+
+'I did not mean that, Mr. O'Donnell.'
+
+'But you'll have me?'
+
+'Gladly.'
+
+Captain Con applauded the final words between them.  They had the genial
+ring, though she accepted the wrong young man for but a shadow of the
+right sort of engagement.
+
+This being settled, by the sudden combination of enthusiastic Irish
+impulse and benevolent English scheming, she very considerately resigned
+herself to Mrs. Adister's lead and submitted herself to a further jolting
+in the unprogressive conversational coach with Colonel Adister, whose
+fault as a driver was not in avoiding beaten ways, but whipping wooden
+horses.
+
+Evidently those two were little adapted to make the journey of life
+together, though they were remarkably fine likenesses of a pair in the
+dead midway of the journey, Captain Con reflected, and he could have
+jumped at the thought of Patrick's cleverness: it was the one bright
+thing of the evening.  There was a clear gain in it somewhere.  And if
+there was none, Jane Mattock was a good soul worth saving.  Why not all
+the benefaction on our side, and a figo for rewards!  Devotees or
+adventurers, he was ready in imagination to see his cousins play the part
+of either, as the cross-roads offered, the heavens appeared to decree.
+We turn to the right or the left, and this way we're voluntary drudges,
+and that way we're lucky dogs; it's all according to the turn, the fate
+of it.  But never forget that old Ireland is weeping!
+
+               O never forget that old Ireland is weeping
+               The bitter salt tears of the mother bereft!
+
+He hummed the spontaneous lines.  He was accused of singing to himself,
+and a song was vigorously demanded of him by the ladies.
+
+He shook his head.  'I can't,' he sighed.  'I was plucking the drowned
+body of a song out of the waters to give it decent burial.  And if I sing
+I shall be charged with casting a firebrand at Mr. Rockney.'
+
+Rockney assured him that he could listen to anything in verse.
+
+'Observe the sneer:--for our verses are smoke,' said Con.
+
+Miss Mattock pressed him to sing.
+
+But he had saddened his mind about old Ireland: the Irish news weighed
+heavily on him, unrelieved by a tussle with Rockney.  If he sang, it
+would be an Irish song, and he would break down in it, he said; and he
+hinted at an objection of his wife's to spirited Irish songs of the sort
+which carry the sons of Erin bounding over the fences of tyranny and the
+brook of tears.  And perhaps Mr. Rockney might hear a tale in verse as
+hard to bear as he sometimes found Irish prose!--Miss Mattock perceived
+that his depression was genuine, not less than his desire to please her.
+'Then it shall be on another occasion,' she said.
+
+'Oh!  on another occasion I'm the lark to the sky, my dear lady.'
+
+Her carriage was announced.  She gave Patrick a look, with a smile, for
+it was to be a curious experiment.  He put on the proper gravity of a
+young man commissioned, without a dimple of a smile.  Philip bowed to her
+stiffly, as we bow to a commanding officer who has insulted us and will
+hear of it.  But for that, Con would have manoeuvred against his wife to
+send him downstairs at the lady's heels.  The fellow was a perfect
+riddle, hard to read as the zebra lines on the skin of a wild jackass--
+if Providence intended any meaning when she traced them! and it's a moot
+point: as it is whether some of our poets have meaning and are not
+composers of zebra.  'No one knows but them above!' he said aloud,
+apparently to his wife.
+
+'What can you be signifying?' she asked him.  She had deputed Colonel
+Arthur to conduct Miss Mattock and Miss Barrow to their carriage, and she
+supposed the sentence might have a mysterious reference to the plan she
+had formed; therefore it might be a punishable offence.  Her small round
+eyes were wide-open, her head was up and high.
+
+She was easily appeased, too easily.
+
+'The question of rain, madam,' he replied to her repetition of his words.
+'I dare say that was what I had in my mind, hearing Mr. Mattock and Mr.
+Rockney agree to walk in company to their clubs.'
+
+He proposed to them that they should delay the march on a visit to his
+cabin near the clouds.  They were forced to decline his invitation to the
+gentle lion's mouth; as did Mr. Rumford, very briskly and thankfully.
+Mr. Rockney was taken away by Mr. and Mrs. Marbury Dyke.  So the party
+separated, and the Englishmen were together, and the Irishmen together;
+and hardly a syllable relating to the Englishmen did the Irishmen say,
+beyond an allusion to an accident to John Mattock's yacht off the Irish
+west-coast last autumn; but the Irishmen were subjected to some remarks
+by the Englishmen, wherein their qualities as individuals and specimens
+of a race were critically and neatly packed.  Common sense is necessarily
+critical in its collision with vapours, and the conscious possessors of
+an exclusive common sense are called on to deliver a summary verdict, nor
+is it an unjust one either, if the verdict be taken simply for an
+estimate of what is presented upon the plain surface of to-day.  Irishmen
+are queer fellows, never satisfied, thirsting for a shindy.  Some of them
+get along pretty well in America.  The air of their Ireland intoxicates
+them.  They require the strong hand: fair legislation, but no show of
+weakness.  Once let them imagine you are afraid of them, and they see
+perfect independence in their grasp.  And what would be the spectacle if
+they were to cut themselves loose from England?  The big ship might be
+inconvenienced by the loss of the tender; the tender would fall adrift on
+the Atlantic, with pilot and captain at sword and pistol, the crew
+playing Donnybrook freely.  Their cooler heads are shrewd enough to see
+the folly, but it catches the Irish fancy to rush to the extreme, and we
+have allowed it to be supposed that it frightens us.  There is the
+capital blunder, fons et origo.
+
+Their leaders now pretend to work upon the Great Scale; they demand
+everything on the spot upon their own interpretation of equity.
+Concessions, hazy speeches, and the puling nonsense of our present
+Government, have encouraged them so far and got us into the mess.  Treat
+them as policemen treat highwaymen: give them the law: and the law must
+be tightened, like the hold on a rogue by his collar, if they kick at it.
+Rockney was for sharp measures in repression, fair legislation in due
+course.
+
+'Fair legislation upon your own interpretation of fair,' said Mattock,
+whose party opposed Rockney's.  'As to repression, you would have missed
+that instructive scene this evening at Con O'Donnell's table, if you had
+done him the kindness to pick up his glove.  It 's wisest to let them
+exhaust their energies upon one another.  Hold off, and they're soon at
+work.'
+
+'What kind of director of a City Company does he make?' said Rockney.
+
+Mattock bethought him that, on the whole, strange to say, Con O'Donnell
+comported himself decorously as a director, generally speaking on the
+reasonable side, not without shrewdness: he seemed to be sobered by the
+money question.
+
+'That wife of his is the salvation of him,' Rockney said, to account for
+the Captain's shrewdness.  'She manages him cleverly.  He knows the
+length of his line.  She's a woman of principle, and barring the
+marriage, good sense too.  His wife keeps him quiet, or we should be
+hearing of him.  Forbery 's a more dangerous man.  There's no intentional
+mischief in Con O'Donnell; it's only effervescence.  I saw his game, and
+declined to uncork him.  He talks of a niece of his wife's: have you ever
+seen her?--married to some Servian or Roumanian prince.'
+
+Mattock answered: 'Yes.'
+
+'Is she such a beauty?'
+
+Again Mattock answered: 'Yes,' after affecting thoughtfulness.
+
+'They seem to marry oddly in that family.'
+
+Mattock let fly a short laugh at the remark, which had the ring of some
+current phrase.  'They do,' he said.
+
+Next morning Jane Mattock spoke to her brother of her recruit.  He
+entirely trusted to her discretion; the idea of a young Irish secretary
+was rather comical, nevertheless.  He had his joke about it, requesting
+to have a sight of the secretary's books at the expiry of the week, which
+was the length of time he granted this ardent volunteer for evaporating
+and vanishing.
+
+'If it releases poor Grace for a week, it will be useful to us,' Jane
+said.  'Women are educated so shamefully that we have not yet found one
+we can rely on as a competent person.  And Mr. O'Donnell--did you notice
+him?  I told you I met him a day or two back--seems willing to be of use.
+It cannot hurt him to try.  Grace has too much on her hands.'
+
+'She has a dozen persons.'
+
+'They are zealous when they are led.'
+
+'Beware of letting them suspect that they are led.'
+
+'They are anxious to help the poor if they can discover how.'
+
+'Good men, I don't doubt,' said John Mattock.  'Any proposals from
+curates recently?'
+
+'Not of late.  Captain O'Donnell, the brother of our secretary, is
+handsomer, but we do not think him so trustworthy.  Did you observe him
+at all?--he sat by me.  He has a conspirator's head.'
+
+'What is that?' her brother asked her.
+
+'Only a notion of mine.'
+
+She was directed to furnish a compendious report of the sayings, doings,
+and behaviour of the Irish secretary in the evening.
+
+'If I find him there,' she said.
+
+Her brother was of opinion that Mr. Patrick O'Donnell would be as good as
+his word, and might be expected to appear there while the novelty lasted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE MATTOCK FAMILY
+
+That evening's report of the demeanour of the young Irish secretary in
+harness was not so exhilarating as John Mattock had expected, and he
+inclined to think his sister guilty of casting her protecting veil over
+the youth.  It appeared that Mr. O'Donnell had been studious of his
+duties, had spoken upon no other topic, had asked pertinent questions,
+shown no flippancy, indulged in no extravagances.  He seemed, Jane said,
+eager to master details.  A certain eagerness of her own in speaking of
+it sharpened her clear features as if they were cutting through derision.
+She stated it to propitiate her brother, as it might have done but for
+the veracious picture of Patrick in the word 'eager,' which pricked the
+scepticism of a practical man.  He locked his mouth, looking at her with
+a twinkle she refused to notice.  'Determined to master details' he could
+have accepted.  One may be determined to find a needle in a dust-heap;
+one does not with any stiffness of purpose go at a dust-heap eagerly.
+Hungry men have eaten husks; they have not betrayed eagerness for such
+dry stuff.  Patrick's voracity after details exhibited a doubtfully
+genuine appetite, and John deferred his amusement until the termination
+of the week or month when his dear good Jane would visit the office to
+behold a vacated seat, or be assailed by the customary proposal.
+Irishmen were not likely to be far behind curates in besieging an
+heiress.  For that matter, Jane was her own mistress and could very well
+take care of herself; he had confidence in her wisdom.
+
+He was besides of an unsuspicious and an unexacting temperament.  The
+things he would strongly object to he did not specify to himself because
+he was untroubled by any forethought of them.  Business, political,
+commercial and marine, left few vacancies in his mind other than for the
+pleasures he could command and enjoy.  He surveyed his England with a
+ruddy countenance, and saw the country in the reflection.  His England
+saw much of itself in him.  Behind each there was more, behind the
+country a great deal more, than could be displayed by a glass.  The
+salient features wore a resemblance.  Prosperity and heartiness; a ready
+hand on, and over, a full purse; a recognised ability of the second-rate
+order; a stout hold of patent principles; inherited and embraced, to make
+the day secure and supply a somniferous pillow for the night; occasional
+fits of anxiety about affairs, followed by an illuminating conviction
+that the world is a changing one and our construction not of granite,
+nevertheless that a justifiable faith in the ship, joined to a constant
+study of the chart, will pull us through, as it has done before, despite
+all assaults and underminings of the common enemy and the particular;
+these, with the humorous indifference of familiarity and constitutional
+annoyances, excepting when they grew acute and called for drugs, and with
+friendliness to the race of man of both colours, in the belief that our
+Creator originally composed in black and white, together with a liking
+for matters on their present footing in slow motion, partly under his
+conductorship, were the prominent characteristics of the grandson of the
+founder of the house, who had built it from a spade.
+
+The story of the building was notorious; popular books for the inciting
+of young Englishmen to dig to fortune had a place for it among the
+chapters, where we read of the kind of man, and the means by which the
+country has executed its later giant strides of advancement.  The first
+John Mattock was a representative of his time; he moved when the country
+was moving, and in the right direction, finding himself at the auspicious
+moment upon a line of rail.  Elsewhere he would have moved, we may
+suppose, for the spade-like virtues bear their fruits; persistent and
+thrifty, solid and square, will fetch some sort of yield out of any soil;
+but he would not have gone far.  The Lord, to whom an old man of a mind
+totally Hebrew ascribed the plenitude of material success, the Lord and
+he would have reared a garden in the desert; in proximity to an oasis,
+still on the sands, against obstacles.  An accumulation of upwards of
+four hundred thousand pounds required, as the moral of the popular books
+does not sufficiently indicate, a moving country, an ardent sphere, to
+produce the sum: and since, where so much was done, we are bound to
+conceive others at work as well as he, it seems to follow that the
+exemplar outstripping them vastly must have profited by situation at
+the start, which is a lucky accident; and an accident is an indigestible
+lump in a moral tale, real though the story be.  It was not mentioned in
+the popular books; nor did those worthy guides to the pursuit of wealth
+contain any reminder of old John Mattock's dependence upon the conjoint
+labour of his fellows to push him to his elevation.  As little did they
+think of foretelling a day, generations hence, when the empty heirs of
+his fellows might prefer a modest claim (confused in statement) to
+compensation against the estate he bequeathed: for such prophecy as that
+would have hinted at a tenderness for the mass to the detriment of the
+individual, and such tenderness as that is an element of our religion,
+not the drift of our teaching.
+
+He grumbled at the heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this
+oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government.  It was
+poor encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a
+mansion!
+
+He paid the money, dying sour; a splendid example of energy on the road,
+a forbidding one at the terminus.  And here the moral of the popular
+books turned aside from him to snatch at humanity for an instance of our
+frailness and dealt in portentous shadows:--we are, it should be known,
+not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be.  Six months before his
+death he appeared in the garb of a navvy, humbly soliciting employment at
+his own house-door.  There he appealed to the white calves of his footmen
+for a day's work, upon the plea that he had never been a democrat.
+
+The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the
+various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had for
+a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the line,
+facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where, as our
+popular words should do, it struck the spectator's eye and his brain
+simultaneously with pugilistic force: a reference to the picture in the
+catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident.  'I've worked a
+good bit in my time, gentlemen, and I baint done yet':--SEE PROFESSOR
+SUMMIT'S 'MEN WHO HAVE COME TO FORTUNE.'  There is, we perceive at a
+glance, a contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying to his
+menials for a day's work at the rate of pay to able-bodied men:--which he
+is not, but the deception is not disingenuous.  The contrast flashed with
+the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring, very popularly.  The
+fustian suit and string below the knee, on the one side, and the purple
+plush breeches and twinkling airy calves (fascinating his attention as he
+makes his humble request to his own, these domestic knights) to right and
+left of the doorway and in front, hit straight out of the canvas.  And as
+quickly as you perceive the contrast you swallow the moral.  The dreaded
+thing is down in a trice, to do what salutary work it may within you.
+That it passed into the blood of England's middle-class population, and
+set many heads philosophically shaking, and filled the sails of many a
+sermon, is known to those who lived in days when Art and the classes
+patronising our Native Art existed happily upon the terms of venerable
+School-Dame and studious pupils, before the sickly era displacing
+Exhibitions full of meaning for tricks of colour, monstrous atmospherical
+vagaries that teach nothing, strange experiments on the complexion of the
+human face divine--the feminine hyper-aethereally.  Like the first John
+Mattock, it was formerly of, and yet by dint of sturdy energy, above the
+people.  They learnt from it; they flocked to it thirsting and retired
+from it thoughtful, with some belief of having drunk of nature in art, as
+you will see the countless troops of urchins about the one cow of London,
+in the Great City's Green Park.
+
+A bequest to the nation of the best of these pictures of Old John, by a
+very old Yorkshire collector, makes it milk for all time, a perpetual
+contrast, and a rebuke.  Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in
+her fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks
+that fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature
+as well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms
+the simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting
+plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the contemplative mind.
+Degeneracy is the critical history of the Arts.  Jane's hair was of a
+reddish gold-inwoven cast that would, in her grandfather's epoch, have
+shone unambiguously as carrots.  The girl of his day thus adorned by
+Nature, would have been shown wearing her ridiculous crown with some
+decent sulkiness; and we should not have had her so unsparingly crowned;
+the truth would have been told in a dexterous concealment--a rope of it
+wound up for a bed of the tortoise-shell comb behind, and a pair of tight
+cornucopias at the temples.  What does our modern artist do but flare it
+to right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, revel in the
+oriental superabundance, and really seem to swear we shall admire it,
+against our traditions of the vegetable, as a poetical splendour.  The
+head of the heiress is in a Jovian shower.  Marigolds are in her hand.
+The whole square of canvas is like a meadow on the borders of June.  It
+causes blinking.
+
+Her brother also is presented: a fine portrait of him, with clipped red
+locks, in blue array, smiling, wearing the rose of briny breezes, a
+telescope under his left arm, his right forefinger on a map, a view of
+Spitzbergen through a cabin-window: for John had notions about the north-
+west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur, was
+not the less a true sailor.
+
+With his brass-buttoned blue coat, and his high coloured cheeks, and his
+convict hair--a layer of brickdust--and his air of princely wealth, and
+the icebergs and hummocks about him, he looks for adventure without a
+thought of his heroism--the country all over.
+
+There he stands, a lover of the sea, and a scientific seaman and engineer
+to boot, practical in every line of his face, defying mankind to suspect
+that he cherishes a grain of romance.  On the wall, just above his
+shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his ship
+in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and so should
+a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready
+for the responsibilities of the title.  Sketches of our ancient wooden
+walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings.  These
+degenerate artists do work hard for their money.
+
+The portrait of John's father, dated a generation back, is just the man
+and little else, phantomly the man.  His brown coat struggles out of the
+obscurity of the background, but it is chiefly background clothing him.
+His features are distinguishable and delicate: you would suppose him
+appearing to you under the beams of a common candle, or cottage coalfire
+--ferruginously opaque.  The object of the artist (apart from the triumph
+of tone on the canvas) is to introduce him as an elegant and faded
+gentleman, rather retiring into darkness than emerging.  He is the ghost
+of the painter's impasto.  Yet this is Ezra Mattock, who multipled the
+inheritance of the hundreds of thousands into millions, and died, after
+covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas with iron rails, one of the few
+Christians that can hold up their heads beside the banking Jew as
+magnates in the lists of gold.  The portrait is clearly no frontispiece
+of his qualities.  He married an accomplished and charitable lady, and
+she did not spoil the stock in refining it.  His life passed quietly;
+his death shook the country: for though it had been known that he had
+been one of our potentates, how mightily he was one had not entered into
+the calculations of the public until the will of the late Ezra Mattock,
+cited in our prints, received comments from various newspaper articles.
+A chuckle of collateral satisfaction ran through the empire.  All England
+and her dependencies felt the state of cousinship with the fruits of
+energy; and it was an agreeable sentiment, coming opportunely, as it did,
+at the tail of articles that had been discussing a curious manifestation
+of late--to-wit, the awakening energy of the foreigner--a prodigious
+apparition on our horizon.  Others were energetic too!  We were not, the
+sermon ran, to imagine we were without rivals in the field.  We were
+possessed of certain positive advantages; we had coal, iron, and an
+industrious population, but we were, it was to be feared, by no means a
+thrifty race, and there was reason for doubt whether in the matter of
+industry we were quite up to the mark of our forefathers.  No
+deterioration of the stock was apprehended, still the nation must be
+accused of a lack of vigilance.  We must look round us, and accept the
+facts as they stood.  So accustomed had we become to the predominance of
+our position that it was difficult at first to realise a position of
+rivalry that threatened our manufacturing interests in their hitherto
+undisputed lead in the world's markets.  The tale of our exports for the
+last five years conveys at once its moral and its warning.  Statistics
+were then cited.
+
+As when the gloomy pedagogue has concluded his exhortation, statistics
+birched the land.  They were started at our dinner-tables, and scourged
+the social converse.  Not less than in the articles, they were perhaps
+livelier than in the preface; they were distressing nevertheless; they
+led invariably to the question of our decadence.  Carthage was named; a
+great mercantile community absolutely obliterated!  Senatorial men were
+led to propose in their thoughtfullest tones that we should turn our
+attention to Art.  Why should we not learn to excel in Art?  We excelled
+in Poetry.  Our Poets were cited: not that there was a notion that poems
+would pay as an export but to show that if we excel in one of the Arts we
+may in others of them.  The poetry was not cited, nor was it necessary,
+the object being to inflate the balloon of paradox with a light-flying
+gas, and prove a poem-producing people to be of their nature born
+artists; if they did but know it.  The explosion of a particular trade
+points to your taking up another.  Energy is adapted to flourish equally
+in every branch of labour.
+
+It is the genius of the will, commanding all the crossroads.  A country
+breeding hugely must prove its energy likewise in the departments of the
+mind, or it will ultimately be unable to feed its young--nay, to feast
+its aldermen!  Let us be up and alive.--Such was the exhortation of a
+profound depression.  Outside these dismal assemblies, in the streets,
+an ancient song of raven recurrence croaked of 'Old England a-going down
+the hill'; for there is a link of electricity between the street-boy and
+the leading article in days when the Poles exchange salutations.
+
+Mr. Ezra's legacy of his millions to son and daughter broke like a golden
+evening on the borders of the raincloud.  Things could not be so bad when
+a plain untitled English gentleman bequeathed in the simplest manner
+possible such giant heaps, a very Pelion upon Ossa, of wealth to his
+children.  The minds of the readers of journals were now directed to
+think of the hoarded treasures of this favoured country.  They might
+approximately be counted, but even if counted they would be past
+conception, like the sidereal system.  The contemplation of a million
+stupefies: consider the figures of millions and millions!  Articles were
+written on Lombard Street, the world's gold-mine, our granary of energy,
+surpassing all actual and fabulous gold-mines ever spoken of: Aladdin's
+magician would find his purse contracting and squeaking in the
+comparison.  Then, too, the store of jewels held by certain private
+families called for remark and an allusion to Sindbad the sailor, whose
+eyes were to dilate wider than they did in the valley of diamonds.  Why,
+we could, if we pleased, lie by and pass two or three decades as jolly
+cricketers and scullers, and resume the race for wealth with the rest of
+mankind, hardly sensible of the holiday in our pockets though we were the
+last people to do it, we were the sole people that had the option.  Our
+Fortunatus' cap was put to better purposes, but to have the cap, and not
+to be emasculated by the possession, might excuse a little reasonable
+pride in ourselves.
+
+Thus did Optimism and Pessimism have their turn, like the two great
+parties in the State, and the subsiding see-saw restored a proper
+balance, much to the nation's comfort.  Unhappily, it was remembered,
+there are spectators of its method of getting to an equipoise out of the
+agitation of extremes.  The peep at our treasures to regain composure
+had, we fear, given the foreigner glimpses, and whetted the appetite of
+our masses.  No sooner are we at peace than these are heard uttering low
+howls, and those are seen enviously glaring.  The spectre, Panic, that
+ever dogs the optimistic feast, warns us of a sack under our beds, and
+robbers about to try a barely-bolted door. . .  Then do we, who have so
+sweetly sung our senses to sleep, start up, in their grip, rush to the
+doctor and the blacksmith, rig alarums, proclaim ourselves intestinally
+torn, defenceless, a prey to foes within and without.  It is discovered
+to be no worse than an alderman's dream, but the pessimist frenzy of the
+night has tossed a quieting sop to the Radical, and summoned the
+volunteers to a review.  Laudatory articles upon the soldierly 'march
+past' of our volunteers permit of a spell of soft repose, deeper than
+prudent, at the end of it, India and Ireland consenting.
+
+So much for a passing outline of John Bull--the shadow on the wall of
+John Mattock.  The unostentatious millionaire's legacy to his two
+children affected Mr. Bull thrillingly, pretty nearly as it has here been
+dotted in lining.  That is historical.  Could he believe in the existence
+of a son of his, a master of millions, who had never sighed (and he had
+only to sigh) to die a peer, or a baronet, or simple Knight?  The
+downright hard-nailed coffin fact was there; the wealthiest man in the
+country had flown away to Shadowland a common Mr.!  You see the straight
+deduction from the circumstances:--we are, say what you will, a
+Republican people!  Newspaper articles on the watch sympathetically for
+Mr. Bull's latest view of himself, preached on the theme of our peculiar
+Republicanism.  Soon after he was observed fondling the Crown Insignia.
+His bards flung out their breezy columns, reverentially monarchial.  The
+Republican was informed that they were despised as a blatant minority.  A
+maudlin fit of worship of our nobility had hold of him next, and English
+aristocracy received the paean.  Lectures were addressed to democrats;
+our House of Lords was pledged solemnly in reams of print.  We were told
+that 'blood' may always be betted on to win the race; blood that is blue
+will beat the red hollow.  Who could pretend to despise the honour of
+admission to the ranks of the proudest peerage the world has known!  Is
+not a great territorial aristocracy the strongest guarantee of national
+stability?  The loudness of the interrogation, like the thunder of Jove,
+precluded thought of an answer.
+
+Mr. Bull, though he is not of lucid memory, kept an eye on the owner of
+those millions.  His bards were awake to his anxiety, and celebrated John
+Mattock's doings with a trump and flourish somewhat displeasing to a
+quietly-disposed commoner.  John's entry into Parliament as a Liberal was
+taken for a sign of steersman who knew where the tide ran.  But your
+Liberals are sometimes Radicals in their youth, and his choice of parties
+might not be so much sagacity as an instance of unripe lightheadedness.
+A young conservative millionaire is less disturbing.  The very wealthy
+young peer is never wanton in his politics, which seems to admonish us
+that the heir of vast wealth should have it imposed on him to accept a
+peerage, and be locked up as it were.  A coronet steadies the brain.
+You may let out your heels at the social laws, you are almost expected to
+do it, but you are to shake that young pate of yours restively under such
+a splendid encumbrance.  Private reports of John, however, gave him
+credit for sound opinions: he was moderate, merely progressive.  When it
+was added that the man had the habit of taking counsel with his sister,
+he was at once considered as fast and safe, not because of any public
+knowledge of the character of Jane Mattock.  We pay this homage to the
+settled common sense of women.  Distinctly does she discountenance leaps
+in the dark, wild driving, and the freaks of Radicalism.
+
+John, as it happened, had not so grave a respect for the sex as for the
+individual Jane.  He thought women capable of acts of foolishness; his
+bright-faced sister he could thoroughly trust for prudent conduct.  He
+gave her a good portion of his heart in confidence, and all of it in
+affection.  There were matters which he excluded from confidence, even
+from intimate communication with himself.  These he could not reveal; nor
+could she perfectly open her heart to him, for the same reason.  They
+both had an established ideal of their personal qualities, not far above
+the positive, since they were neither of them pretentious, yet it was a
+trifle higher and fairer than the working pattern; and albeit they were
+sincere enough, quite sincere in their mutual intercourse, they had, by
+what each knew at times of the thumping organ within them, cause for
+doubting that they were as transparent as the other supposed; and they
+were separately aware of an inward smile at one another's partial
+deception; which did not thwart their honest power of working up to the
+respected ideal.  The stroke of the deeper self-knowledge rarely shook
+them; they were able to live with full sensations in the animated picture
+they were to the eyes best loved by them.  This in fact was their life.
+Anything beside it was a dream, and we do not speak of our dreams--not of
+every dream.  Especially do we reserve our speech concerning the dream in
+which we had a revelation of the proud frame deprived of a guiding will,
+flung rudderless on the waves.  Ah that abject!  The dismantled ship has
+the grandeur of the tempest about it, but the soul swayed by passion is
+ignominiously bare-poled, detected, hooted by its old assumption.  If
+instinct plays fantastical tricks when we are sleeping, let it be ever
+behind a curtain.  We can be held guilty only if we court exposure.  The
+ideal of English gentleman and gentlewoman is closely Roman in the self-
+repression it exacts, and that it should be but occasionally difficult to
+them shows an affinity with the type.  Do you perchance, O continental
+observers of the race, call it hypocritical?  It is their nature
+disciplined to the regimental step of civilisation.  Socially these
+island men and women of a certain middle rank are veterans of an army,
+and some of the latest enrolled are the stoutest defenders of the flag.
+
+Brother and sister preserved their little secrets of character apart.
+They could not be expected to unfold what they declined personally to
+examine.  But they were not so successful with the lady governing the
+household, their widowed maternal aunt, Mrs. Lackstraw, a woman of
+decisive penetration, and an insubordinate recruit of the army aforesaid.
+To her they were without a mask; John was passion's slave, Jane the most
+romantic of Eve's daughters.  She pointed to incidents of their youth;
+her vision was acutely retrospective.  The wealth of her nephew and niece
+caused such a view of them to be, as she remarked, anxious past
+endurance.  She had grounds for fearing that John, who might step to an
+alliance with any one of the proudest houses in the Kingdom, would marry
+a beggar-maid.  As for Jane, she was the natural prey of a threadbare
+poet.  Mrs. Lackstraw heard of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell, and demanded the
+right to inspect him.  She doubted such perfect disinterestedness in any
+young man as that he should slave at account-keeping to that Laundry
+without a prospect of rich remuneration, and the tale of his going down
+to the city for a couple of hours each day to learn the art of keeping
+books was of very dubious import in a cousin of Captain Con O'Donnell.
+'Let me see your prodigy,' she said, with the emphasis on each word.
+Patrick was presented at her table.  She had steeled herself against an
+Irish tongue.  He spoke little, appeared simple, professed no enthusiasm
+for the Laundry.  And he paid no compliments to Jane: of the two he was
+more interested by the elder lady, whose farm and dairy in Surrey he
+heard her tell of with a shining glance, observing that he liked thick
+cream: there was a touch of home in it.  The innocent sensuality in the
+candid avowal of his tastes inspired confidence.  Mrs. Lackstraw fished
+for some account of his home.  He was open to flow on the subject; he
+dashed a few sketches of mother and sisters, dowerless girls, fresh as
+trout in the stream, and of his own poor estate, and the peasantry, with
+whom he was on friendly terms.  He was an absentee for his education.
+Sweet water, pure milk, potatoes and bread, were the things he coveted in
+plenty for his people and himself, he said, calling forth an echo from
+Mrs. Lackstraw, and an invitation to come down to her farm in the Spring.
+'That is, Mr. O'Donnell, if you are still in London.'
+
+'Oh, I'm bound apprentice for a year,' said he.
+
+He was asked whether he did not find it tiresome work.
+
+'A trifle so,' he confessed.
+
+Then why did he pursue it, the question was put.
+
+He was not alive for his own pleasure, and would like to feel he was
+doing a bit of good, was the answer.
+
+Could one, Mrs. Lackstraw asked herself, have faith in this young
+Irishman?  He possessed an estate.  His brogue rather added to his air of
+truthfulness.  His easy manners and the occasional streak of correct
+French in his dialogue cast a shadow on it.  Yet he might be an ingenuous
+creature precisely because of the suspicion roused by his quaint
+unworldliness that he might be a terrible actor.  Why not?--his heart was
+evidently much more interested in her pursuits than in her niece's.  The
+juvenility of him was catching, if it was indeed the man, and not one of
+the actor's properties.  Mrs. Lackstraw thought it prudent to hint at the
+latter idea to Jane while she decided in her generosity to embrace the
+former.  Oh! if all Irishmen shared his taste for sweet water, pure milk
+and wholesome bread, what a true Union we should have!  She had always
+insisted on those three things as most to be desired on earth for the
+masses, and she reminded Jane of it as a curious fact.  Jane acquiesced,
+having always considered it a curious fact that her aunt should combine
+the relish of a country life with the intensest social ambition--
+a passion so sensitive as to make the name her husband had inflicted on
+her a pain and a burden.  The name of Mattock gave her horrors.  She
+spoke of it openly to prove that Jane must marry a title and John become
+a peer.  Never was there such a name to smell of the soil.  She declared
+her incapacity to die happy until the two had buried Mattock.  Her own
+one fatal step condemned her, owing to the opinion she held upon the
+sacredness of marriage, as Lackstraw on her tombstone, and to Lackstraw
+above the earthly martyr would go bearing the designation which marked
+her to be claimed by him.  But for John and Jane the index of Providence
+pointed a brighter passage through life.  They had only to conquer the
+weakness native to them--the dreadful tendency downward.  They had, in
+the spiritual sense, frail hearts.  The girl had been secretive about the
+early activity of hers, though her aunt knew of two or three adventures
+wanting in nothing save boldness to have put an end to her independence
+and her prospects:--hence this Laundry business!  a clear sign of some
+internal disappointment.  The boy, however, had betrayed himself in his
+mother's days, when it required all her influence and his father's
+authority, with proof positive of the woman's unworthiness, to rescue him
+from immediate disaster.
+
+Mrs. Lackstraw's confidences on the theme of the family she watched over
+were extended to Patrick during their strolls among the ducks and fowls
+and pheasants at her farm.  She dealt them out in exclamations, as much
+as telling him that now they knew him they trusted him, notwithstanding
+the unaccountable part he played as honorary secretary to that Laundry.
+The confidences, he was aware, were common property of the visitors one
+after another, but he had the knowledge of his being trusted as not every
+Irishman would have been.  A service of six months to the secretaryship
+established his reputation as the strange bird of a queer species: not
+much less quiet, honest, methodical, than an Englishman, and still
+impulsive, Irish still; a very strange bird.
+
+The disposition of the English to love the children of Erin, when not
+fretted by them, was shown in the treatment Patrick received from the
+Mattock family.  It is a love resembling the affection of the stage-box
+for a set of favourite performers, and Patrick, a Celt who had schooled
+his wits to observe and meditate, understood his position with them as
+one of the gallant and amusing race, as well as the reason why he had won
+their private esteem.  They are not willingly suspicious: it agitates
+their minds to be so; and they are most easily lulled by the flattery of
+seeing their special virtues grafted on an alien stock: for in this
+admiration of virtues that are so necessary to the stalwart growth of
+man, they become just sensible of a minor deficiency; the tree, if we
+jump out of it to examine its appearance, should not be all trunk.  Six
+months of ungrudging unremunerated service, showing devotion to the good
+cause and perfect candour from first to last, was English, and a poetic
+touch beyond: so that John Mattock, if he had finished the sentence
+instead of lopping it with an interjection, would have said: 'These Irish
+fellows, when they're genuine and first rate!--are pretty well the pick
+of the land.'  Perhaps his pause on the interjection expressed a doubt
+of our getting them genuine.  Mr. O'Donnell was a sort of exceptional
+Irishman, not devoid of practical ability in a small way--he did his
+duties of secretary fairly well; apparently sincere--he had refrained
+from courting Jane; an odd creature enough, what with his mixture of
+impulsiveness and discretion; likeable, pleasant to entertain and talk
+to; not one of your lunatics concerning his country--he could listen to
+an Englishman's opinion on that head, listen composedly to Rockney,
+merely seeming to take notes; and Rockney was, as Captain Con termed him,
+Press Dragoon about Ireland, a trying doctor for a child of the patient.
+
+On the whole, John Mattock could shake his hand heartily when he was
+leaving our shores.  Patrick was released by Miss Grace Barrow's
+discovery at last of a lady capable of filling his place: a circumstance
+that he did not pretend to regret.  He relinquished his post and stood
+aside with the air of a disciplined soldier.  This was at the expiration
+of seven months and two weeks of service.  Only after he had gone, upon
+her receiving his first letter from the Continent, did Jane distinguish
+in herself the warmth of friendliness she felt for him, and know that of
+all around her she, reproaching every one who had hinted a doubt, had
+been the most suspicious of his pure simplicity.  It was the vice of her
+condition to be suspicious of the honesty of men.  She thought of her
+looks as less attractive than they were; of her wealth she had reason to
+think that the scent transformed our sad sex into dogs under various
+disguises.  Remembering her chill once on hearing Patrick in a green lane
+where they botanised among spring flowers call himself her Irish cousin,
+as if he had advanced a step and betrayed the hoof, she called him her
+Irish cousin now in good earnest.  Her nation was retrospectively
+enthusiastic.  The cordiality of her letter of reply to the wandering
+Patrick astonished him on the part of so cool a young lady; and Captain
+Con, when he heard Miss Mattock speak of Patrick to his wife, came to the
+conclusion that the leery lad had gone a far way toward doing the trick
+for himself, though Jane said his correspondence was full of the deeds of
+his brother in India.  She quite sparkled in speaking of this boy.
+
+She and the captain had an interchange of sparklings over absent Patrick,
+at a discovery made by Miss Colesworth, the lady replacing him, in a nook
+of the amateur secretary's official desk, under heaps of pamphlets and
+slips, French and English and Irish journals, not at all bearing upon the
+business of the Laundry.  It was a blotting-pad stuffed with Patrick's
+jottings.  Jane brought it to Con as to the proper keeper of the
+reliquary.  He persuaded her to join him in examining it, and together
+they bent their heads, turning leaf by leaf, facing, laughing, pursuing
+the search for more, sometimes freely shouting.
+
+Her inspection of the contents had previously been shy; she had just
+enough to tell her they were funny.  Dozens of scraps, insides of torn
+envelopes, invitation-cards, ends of bills received from home, whatever
+was handy to him at the moment, had done service for the overflow of Mr.
+Secretary's private notes and reflections; the blotting-paper as well;
+though that was devoted chiefly to sketches of the human countenance,
+the same being almost entirely of the fair.  Jane fancied she spied
+herself among the number.  Con saw the likeness, but not considering
+it a complimentary one, he whisked over the leaf.  Grace Barrow was
+unmistakeable.  Her dimpled cushion features, and very intent eyes gazing
+out of the knolls and dingles, were given without caricature.  Miss
+Colesworth appeared on the last page, a half-length holding a big key,
+demure between curls.  The key was explained by a cage on a stool, and a
+bird flying out.  She had unlocked the cage for Patrick.
+
+'He never seemed anxious to be released while he was at work,' said Jane,
+after she and the captain had spelt the symbolling in turns.
+
+'And never thirsted to fly till he flew, I warrant him,' said Con.
+
+A repeated sketch of some beauty confused them both; neither of them
+could guess the proud owner of those lineaments.  Con proclaimed it to be
+merely one of the lad's recollections, perhaps a French face.  He thought
+he might have seen a face rather resembling it, but could not call to
+mind whose face it was.
+
+'I dare say it's just a youngster's dream on a stool at a desk, as poets
+write sonnets in their youth to nobody, till they're pierced by somebody,
+and then there's a difference in their handwriting,' he said, vexed with
+Patrick for squandering his opportunity to leave a compliment to the
+heiress behind him.
+
+Jane flipped the leaves back to the lady with stormy hair.
+
+'But you'll have the whole book, and hand it to him when he returns; it
+'ll come best from you,' said Con.  'The man on horseback, out of
+uniform, 's brother Philip, of course.  And man and horse are done to the
+life.  Pray, take it, Miss Mattock.  I should lose it to a certainty; I
+should; I can't be trusted.  You'll take it!'
+
+He pressed her so warmly to retain the bundle in her custody that she
+carried it away.
+
+Strange to say the things she had laughed at had been the things which
+struck her feelings and sympathies.  Patrick's notes here and there
+recalled conversations he had more listened to than taken part in between
+herself and Grace Barrow.  Who could help laughing at his ideas about
+women!  But if they were crude, they were shrewd--or so she thought them;
+and the jejuneness was, to her mind, chiefly in the dressing of them.
+Grace agreed with her, for Grace had as good a right to inspect the
+papers as she, and a glance had shown that there was nothing of peculiar
+personal import in his notes: he did not brood on himself.
+
+Here was one which tickled the ladies and formed a text for discussion.
+
+'Women must take the fate of market-fruit till they earn their own
+pennies, and then they 'll regulate the market.  It is a tussle for money
+with them as with us, meaning power.  They'd do it as little by oratory
+as they have done by millinery, for their oratory, just like their
+millinery, appeals to a sentiment, and to a weaker; and nothing solid
+comes of a sentiment.  Power is built on work.'
+
+To this was appended: 'The better for mankind in the developing process,
+ay, and a bad day for us, boys, when study masks the charming eyes in
+gig-lamps, and there is no pretty flying before us.  Good-night to Cupid,
+I fear.  May be I am not seeing far enough, and am asking for the devil
+to have the loveliest women as of old.  Retro S. M.'
+
+The youthful eye on their sex, the Irish voice, and the perceptible moral
+earnestness in the background, made up a quaint mixture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM: AND SOMETHING
+OF RICHARD ROCKNEY
+
+Meanwhile India, our lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and Ireland,
+our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber.  The volcano we
+couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at an
+armistice with the gastric juices.  Once more the personification of the
+country's prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness.
+Trade whipped him merrily, and he spun.
+
+A fuller sketch of the figure of this remarkable emanation of us and
+object of our worship, Bull, is required that we may breathe the
+atmosphere of a story dealing with such very different views of the idol,
+and learn to tolerate plain-speaking about him.
+
+Fancy yourself delayed by stress of weather at an inn or an excursion,
+and snapped up by some gossip drone of the district, who hearing whither
+you are bound, recounts the history and nature of the place, to your
+ultimate advantage, though you groan for the outer downpour to abate.--
+Of Bull, then: our image, before the world: our lord and tyrant, ourself
+in short--the lower part of us.  Coldly worshipped on the whole, he can
+create an enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up to peaceful
+skies and the domestic English world spins with him.  What he does not
+like will then be the forbidding law of a most governable people, what
+he does like the consenting.  If it is declared that argument will be
+inefficacious to move him, he is adored in the form of post.  A hint of
+his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous rush of his devotees.
+Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the fanatical subserviency
+from the example of our subject India.  We may deem it native; perhaps
+of its origin Aryan, but we have made it our own.  Some have been so
+venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to the protecting
+smiles of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to encourage the
+development of a wanton eccentricity.  Certain weeds of the human bosom
+are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be guaranteed.  Men,
+for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone to the same sort
+of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to it which we
+behold in his tidal bodies of supporters.  Neptune has done something.
+One thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the
+utmost.  Spy you insecurity?--a possibility of invasion?  Then indeed the
+colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any
+suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer.  But as there is no
+attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.
+Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger
+across the Channel on a windy night:--Take heart, son John!  They will
+have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you.  The testification to
+the Sea-God's watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately as
+horny to argument as before.  Neptune shall have his share of the
+honours.
+
+Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of
+heresy, opposition to his image.  It is an exercise of imagination to
+accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner of
+the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that flowering
+stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily casts out
+what it cannot consume.  He is a positive shape, a practical corporation,
+and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the
+Press and his jester Frank Guffaw.  There, begirt by laughing ocean-
+waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that
+other Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so
+wonderful as printed sheets.  Rounder at each inspection, he preaches to
+mankind from the text of a finger curved upon the pattern spectacles.
+Your Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering on tentative politics; your
+Germans ploughing in philosophy, thumbing classics, composing music of a
+novel order: both are marching, evolutionising, learning how to kill.
+Ridiculous Germans! capricious Frenchmen!  We want nothing new in
+musical composition and abstract speculation of an indecent mythology,
+or political contrivances and schemes of Government, and we do not want
+war.  Peace is the Goddess we court for the hand of her daughter Plenty,
+and we have won that jolly girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-
+feast; but avaunt new-fangled theories and howlings: old tunes, tried
+systems, for us, my worthy friends.
+
+Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic
+invitation to the leaner kine.  It can exhibit to the world that Peace is
+a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping the
+pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth.  Bull's perusal
+of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat meads;
+he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for a sign of
+his diligent wisdom in seizing the day.  He can read the page fronting
+him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will vociferously
+confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe there is no such
+thing as a present hour for man.
+
+In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate.  Often do we
+have him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
+spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
+him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without one bit
+of tracery on its black breast other than that which his apprehensions
+project.  As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes, thinner than the
+phantom banquets of recollection.  What has he done for the growth of his
+globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful posture the upper, and
+justly the directing globe, through whose directions we do, by feeding on
+the past to sow the future, create a sensible present composed of both--
+the present of the good using of our powers.  What can he show in the
+Arts?  What in Arms?  His bards--O faithless!  but they are men--his
+bards accuse him of sheer cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility
+of brain, drowsihood, mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness.  They
+question him to deafen him of our defences, our intellectual eminence,
+our material achievements, our poetry, our science; they sneer at his
+trust in Neptune, doubt the scaly invulnerability of the God.  They
+point over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident
+foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in
+industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour
+of verse=-our supreme accomplishment.
+
+Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his
+pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is
+down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,
+lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports
+from camps of foreign armies.  He drops his head like a smitten ox to all
+great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining
+apostrophe.  He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what
+poetry means.  If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness in
+times of reverse.  Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are the
+generators of the conquering energies.  He is now for brains at all
+costs, he has gained a conception of them.  He is ready to knock
+knighthood on the heads of men of brains--even literary brains.  They
+shall be knights, an ornamental body.  To make them peers, and a
+legislative, has not struck him, for he has not yet imagined them a
+stable body.  They require petting, to persuade them to flourish and
+bring him esteem.
+
+This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed as
+though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.
+Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his
+nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud of
+it.  Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country,
+unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit
+of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for the
+sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win
+affection.  Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to
+go without the gift of expression.  Its behaviour is honourable under a
+discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful
+speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men.  Salt is
+in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim
+its virtues.  They will not; they are averse.  The only voice it has is
+the Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil
+the charm.  So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch
+of Bull.  We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes,
+by no means delighting in his representation of them.  When such is felt
+to be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as a
+vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour--we enjoy
+grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome: our subtle
+conceit insists on the reverse.  Nevertheless, no sooner are the hours
+auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family goat,
+ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness.  And he is
+at times a mad Bull: a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving,
+excessive, very parlous Bull.  It is in his history that frenzies catch
+him, when to be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to
+mention a shattering of our timbers.  It is but in days of the rousing of
+the under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the
+advent of, that we are well rid of him for a while.  In the interim he
+does mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he
+paid the Dannegelt for peace.  Englishmen of feeling do not relish him.
+For men with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund
+grotesque, with his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of
+the pocket, his fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness, is
+a shame and a loathing.  You attach small importance to images and
+symbols; yet if they seem representative, and they sicken numbers of us,
+they are important.  The hat we wear, though it is not a part of the
+head, stamps the character of our appearance and has a positive influence
+on our bearing.  Symbolical decorations will stimulate the vacant-minded
+to act up to them, they encircle and solidify the mass; they are a sword
+of division between Celts and Saxons if they are abhorrent to one
+section.  And the Celtic brotherhood are not invariably fools in their
+sensitiveness.  They serve you on the field of Mars, and on other fields
+to which the world has given glory.  These execrate him as the full-grown
+Golden Calf of heathenish worship.  And they are so restive because they
+are so patriotic.  Think a little upon the ideas of unpatriotic Celts
+regarding him.  You have heard them.  You tell us they are you:
+accurately, they affirm, succinctly they see you in his crescent
+outlines, tame bulk, spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker; his
+imperviousness to whatsoever does not confront the sensual eye of
+him with a cake or a fist, his religious veneration of his habitual
+indulgences, his peculiar forms of nightmare.  They swear to his
+perfect personification of your moods, your Saxon moods, which their
+inconsiderate spleen would have us take for unmixedly Saxon.  They are
+unjust, but many of them speak with a sense of the foot on their necks,
+and they are of a blood demanding a worshipworthy idea.  And they dislike
+Bull's bellow of disrespect for their religion, much bruited in the
+meadows during his periods of Arcadia.  They dislike it, cannot forget
+the sound: it hangs on the afflicted drum of the ear when they are in
+another land, perhaps when the old devotion to their priest has expired.
+For this, as well as for material reasons, they hug the hatred they
+packed up among their bundles of necessaries and relics, in the flight
+from home, and they instruct their children to keep it burning.  They
+transmit the sentiment of the loathing of Bull, as assuredly they would
+be incapable of doing, even with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed
+motherly Britannia the figure sitting in the minds of men for our image
+--a palpitating figure, alive to change, penetrable to thought, and not a
+stolid concrete of our traditional old yeoman characteristic.  Verily he
+lives for the present, all for the present, will be taught in sorrow that
+there is no life for him but of past and future: his delusion of the
+existence of a present hour for man will not outlast the season of his
+eating and drinking abundantly in security.  He will perceive that it was
+no more than the spark shot out from the clash of those two meeting
+forces; and penitently will he gaze back on that misleading spark-the
+spectral planet it bids wink to his unreceptive stars--acknowledging him
+the bare machine for those two to drive, no instrument of enjoyment.  He
+lives by reading rearward and seeing vanward.  He has no actual life save
+in power of imagination.  He has to learn this fact, the great lesson of
+all men.  Furthermore there may be a future closed to him if he has
+thrown too extreme a task of repairing on that bare machine of his.  The
+sight of a broken-down plough is mournful, but the one thing to do with
+it is to remove it from the field.
+
+Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet
+of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and
+vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank.  A journalist
+altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained,
+he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he
+was profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain.
+He had a manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the
+antechamber for proof of his knowing himself to be this person.  He did
+not so much write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver
+Orphic sentences.  He was in one her physician, her spiritual director,
+her man-at-arms.  Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic
+assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of
+the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show.  He meant hard steel to
+defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state, and
+the monition for her soul's welfare.  Nor did he pretend to special
+privileges in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had studied
+her case, was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly, not to
+say inspiredly.  Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as wisely,
+then all his weapons to back you.  There were occasions when
+distinguished officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus
+of Rockney's approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to
+bestow it.  The act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the
+objects propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of any
+man adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of his
+attachment.  If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed
+generally, they travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they
+were precipitated, the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at
+a more enlightened passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney's.  Others
+perchance might equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the
+vigilant circumspection, the shaping forethought.  That clear knowledge
+of the right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others.
+Enough to profit them this way and yonder as one best can!  You know the
+newspaper Press is a mighty engine.  Still he had no delight in shuffling
+a puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures.  His calls for
+them resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.
+
+Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the
+world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating
+devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency,
+notwithstanding that the commencement of his journalistic career smelt
+of sources entirely opposed to the conclusions upon which it broadened.
+One secret of the belief in his love of his country was the readiness of
+Rockney's pen to support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of the
+bluff besides.  His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on our
+streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than the
+island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and threads
+in the island.  Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of cowardice:
+how one man stood against a host for law or humanity, how crowds looked
+on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight was maintained in some sly
+ring between two of equal brawn: and manufacturers were warned of the
+consequences of their iniquities, Government was lashed for sleeping upon
+shaky ordinances, colonists were gibbeted for the maltreating of natives:
+the ring and fervour of the notes on daily events told of Rockney's hand
+upon the national heart--with a faint, an enforced, reluctant indication
+of our not being the men we were.
+
+But after all, the main secret was his art of writing round English,
+instead of laborious Latinised periods: and the secret of the art was his
+meaning what he said.  It was the personal throb.  The fire of a mind was
+translucent in Press columns where our public had been accustomed to the
+rhetoric of primed scribes.  He did away with the Biscay billow of the
+leading article--Bull's favourite prose--bardic construction of sentences
+that roll to the antithetical climax, whose foamy top is offered and
+gulped as equivalent to an idea.  Writing of such a kind as Rockney's was
+new to a land where the political opinions of Joint Stock Companies had
+rattled Jovian thunders obedient to the nod of Bull.  Though not alone in
+working the change, he was the foremost.  And he was not devoid of style.
+Fervidness is the core of style.  He was a tough opponent for his betters
+in education, struck forcibly, dexterously, was always alert for debate.
+An encounter between Swift and Johnson, were it imaginable, would present
+us probably the most prodigious Gigantomachy in literary polemics.  It is
+not imaginable among comparative pygmies.  But Rockney's combat with his
+fellow-politicians of the Press partook of the Swiftian against the
+Johnsonian in form.  He was a steam ram that drove straight at the bulky
+broadside of the enemy.
+
+Premiers of parties might be Captains of the State for Rockney: Rockney
+was the premier's pilot, or woe to him.  Woe to the country as well,
+if Rockney's directions for steering were unheeded.  He was a man of
+forethought, the lover of Great Britain: he shouted his directions in
+the voice of the lover of his mistress, urged to rebuke, sometimes to
+command, the captain by the prophetic intimations of a holier alliance,
+a more illumined prescience.  Reefs here, shallows there, yonder a foul
+course: this is the way for you!  The refusal of the captain to go this
+way caused Rockney sincerely to discredit the sobriety of his intellect.
+It was a drunken captain.  Or how if a traitorous?  We point out the
+danger to him, and if he will run the country on to it, we proclaim him
+guilty either of inebriety or of treason--the alternatives are named:
+one or the other has him.  Simple unfitness can scarcely be conceived
+of a captain having our common senses and a warranted pilot at his elbow.
+
+Had not Rockney been given to a high expression of opinion, plain in
+fervour, he would often have been exposed bare to hostile shafts.  Style
+cast her aegis over him.  He wore an armour in which he could walk, run
+and leap-a natural style.  The ardour of his temperament suffused the
+directness of his intelligence to produce it, and the two qualities made
+his weakness and strength.  Feeling the nerve of strength, the weakness
+was masked to him, while his opponents were equally insensible to the
+weakness under the force of his blows.  Thus there was nothing to teach
+him, or reveal him, except Time, whose trick is to turn corners of
+unanticipated sharpness, and leave the directly seeing and ardent to dash
+at walls.
+
+How rigidly should the man of forethought govern himself, question
+himself!  how constantly wrestle with himself!  And if he be a writer
+ebullient by the hour, how snappishly suspect himself, that he may feel
+in conscience worthy of a hearing and have perpetually a conscience in
+his charge!  For on what is his forethought founded?  Does he try the
+ring of it with our changed conditions?  Bus a man of forethought who has
+to be one of our geysers ebullient by the hour must live days of fever.
+His apprehensions distemper his blood; the scrawl of them on the dark of
+the undeveloped dazzles his brain.  He sees in time little else; his very
+sincereness twists him awry.  Such a man has the stuff of the born
+journalist, and journalism is the food of the age.  Ask him, however,
+midway in his running, what he thinks of quick breathing: he will answer
+that to be a shepherd on the downs is to be more a man.  As to the
+gobbling age, it really thinks better of him than he of it.
+
+After a term of prolonged preachification he is compelled to lash that he
+may less despise the age.  He has to do it for his own sake.  O gobbling
+age!  swallowing all, digesting nought, us too you have swallowed,
+O insensate mechanism!  and we will let you know you have a stomach.
+Furiously we disagree with you.  We are in you to lead you or work you
+pangs!
+
+Rockney could not be a mild sermoniser commenting on events.  Rather no
+journalism at all for him!  He thought the office of the ordinary daily
+preacher cowlike.  His gadfly stung him to warn, dictate, prognosticate;
+he was the oracle and martyr of superior vision: and as in affairs of
+business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool sagacity, hard
+on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct discrimination of
+things in their roughness, the knowledge of the firmly-based materialism
+of his nature caused him.  thoroughly to trust to his voice when he
+delivered it in ardour--circumstance coming to be of daily recurrence.
+Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without-which incessant journalism
+is a gabble.  He was sure of his love, but who gave ear to his
+prescience?  Few: the echo of the country now and then, the Government
+not often.  And, dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers, mere commentators
+upon events, manage somehow to keep up the sale of their journals:
+advertisements do not flow and ebb with them as under the influence of a
+capricious moon.  Ah, what a public!  Serve it honourably, you are in
+peril of collapsing: show it nothing but the likeness of its dull animal
+face, you are steadily inflated.  These reflections within us!  Might not
+one almost say that the retreat for the prophet is the wilderness, far
+from the hustled editor's desk; and annual should be the uplifting of his
+voice instead of diurnal, if only to spare his blood the distemper?
+A fund of gout was in Rockney's, and he had begun to churn it.  Between
+gouty blood and luminous brain the strife had set in which does not
+conduce to unwavering sobriety of mind, though ideas remain closely
+consecutive and the utterance resonant.
+
+Never had he been an adulator of Bull.  His defects as well as his
+advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue.  Insisting on a
+future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.
+In the season of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the crisis
+he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English tongue was
+loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery.  Our monumental
+image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at a despot
+constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures to mock the
+gift of liberty.  His articles of foregone years were an extraordinary
+record of events or conditions foreseen: seductive in the review of them
+by a writer who has to be still foreseeing: nevertheless, that none of
+them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have acted wisely
+in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their essential merit,
+consolatory to think of, though painful.  The country has gone the wrong
+road, but it may yet cross over to the right one, when it perceives that
+we were prophetic.
+
+Compared with the bolts discharged at Bull by Rockney's artillery,
+Captain Con O'Donnell's were popgun-pellets.  Only Rockney fired to
+chasten, Con O'Donnell for a diversion, to appease an animus.  The
+revolutionist in English journalism was too devoutly patriotic to
+belabour even a pantomime mask that was taken as representative of us for
+the disdainful fun of it.  Behind the plethoric lamp, now blown with the
+fleshpots, now gasping puffs of panic, he saw the well-minded valorous
+people, issue of glorious grandsires; a nation under a monstrous
+defacement, stupefied by the contemplation of the mask: his vision
+was of the great of old, the possibly great in the graver strife ahead,
+respecters of life, despisers of death, the real English whereas an
+alienated Celtic satirist, through his vivid fancy and his disesteem,
+saw the country incarnate in Bull, at most a roguish screw-kneed clown to
+be whipped out of him.  Celt and Saxon are much inmixed with us, but the
+prevalence of Saxon blood is evinced by the public disregard of any
+Celtic conception of the honourable and the loveable; so that the Celt
+anxious to admire is rebutted, and the hatred of a Celt, quick as he is
+to catch at images, has a figure of hugeous animalism supplied to his
+malign contempt.  Rockney's historic England, and the living heroic
+England to slip from that dull hide in a time of trial, whether of war or
+social suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan
+lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a
+discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do justice; he has
+Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in
+labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer.  And this is
+the creature to whose tail he is tied!  Hereditary hatred is approved by
+critical disgust.  Some spirited brilliancy, some persistent generosity
+(other than the guzzle's flash of it), might soften him; something
+sweeter than the slow animal well-meaningness his placable brethren point
+his attention to.  It is not seen, and though he can understand the
+perils of a severance, he prefers to rub the rawness of his wound and be
+ready to pitch his cap in the air for it, out of sheer bloodloathing of
+a connection that offers him nothing to admire, nothing to hug to his
+heart.  Both below and above the blind mass of discontent in his island,
+the repressed sentiment of admiration-or passion of fealty and thirst to
+give himself to a visible brighter--is an element of the division:
+meditative young Patrick O'Donnell early in his reflections had noted
+that:--and it is partly a result of our daily habit of tossing the straw
+to the monetary world and doting on ourselves in the mirror, until our
+habitual doings are viewed in a bemused complacency by us, and the scum-
+surface of the country is flashed about as its vital being.  A man of
+forethought using the Press to spur Parliament to fitly represent the
+people, and writing on his daily topics with strenuous original vigour,
+even though, like Rockney, he sets the teeth of the Celt gnashing at him,
+goes a step nearer to the bourne of pacification than Press and
+Parliament reflecting the popular opinion that law must be passed to
+temper Ireland's eruptiveness; for that man can be admired, and the Celt,
+in combating him, will like an able and gallant enemy better than a
+grudgingly just, lumbersome, dull, politic friend.  The material points
+in a division are always the stronger, but the sentimental are here very
+strong.  Pass the laws; they may put an extinguisher on the Irish
+Vesuvian; yet to be loved you must be a little perceptibly admirable.
+You may be so self-satisfied as to dispense with an ideal: your yoke-
+fellow is not; it is his particular form of strength to require one for
+his proper blooming, and he does bloom beautifully in the rays he courts.
+
+Ah then, seek to be loved, and banish Bull.  Believe in a future and
+banish that gross obscuration of you.  Decline to let that old-yeoman-
+turned alderman stand any longer for the national man.  Speaking to the
+brain of the country, one is sure of the power of a resolute sign from it
+to dismiss the brainless.  Banish him your revels and your debatings,
+prohibit him your Christmas, lend no ear either to his panics or his
+testiness, especially none to his rages; do not report him at all,
+and he will soon subside into his domestic, varied by pothouse, privacy.
+The brain should lead, if there be a brain.  Once free of him, you will
+know that for half a century you have appeared bottom upward to mankind.
+And you have wondered at the absence of love for you under so astounding
+a presentation.  Even in a Bull, beneficent as he can dream of being,
+when his notions are in a similar state of inversion, should be sheepish
+in hope for love.
+
+He too, whom you call the Welshman, and deride for his delight in songful
+gatherings, harps to wild Wales, his Cambrian highlands, and not to
+England.  You have not yet, though he is orderly and serviceable, allured
+his imagination to the idea of England.  Despite the passion for his
+mountains and the boon of your raising of the interdict (within a hundred
+years) upon his pastors to harangue him in his native tongue, he gladly
+ships himself across the waters traversed by his Prince Madoc of
+tradition, and becomes contentedly a transatlantic citizen, a member of
+strange sects--he so inveterate in faithfulness to the hoar and the
+legendary!--Anything rather than Anglican.  The Cymry bear you no hatred;
+their affection likewise is undefined.  But there is reason to think that
+America has caught the imagination of the Cambrian Celt: names of
+Welshmen are numerous in the small army of the States of the Union; and
+where men take soldier-service they are usually fixed, they and their
+children.  Here is one, not very deeply injured within a century, of
+ardent temperament, given to be songful and loving; he leaves you and
+forgets you.  Be certain that the material grounds of division are not
+all.  To pronounce it his childishness provokes the retort upon your
+presented shape.  He cannot admire it.  Gaelic Scots wind the same note
+of repulsion.
+
+And your poets are in a like predicament.  Your poets are the most
+persuasive of springs to a lively general patriotism.  They are in the
+Celtic dilemma of standing at variance with Bull; they return him his
+hearty antipathy, are unable to be epical or lyrical of him, are
+condemned to expend their genius upon the abstract, the quaint, the
+picturesque.  Nature they read spiritually or sensually, always
+shrinkingly apart from him.  They swell to a resemblance of their patron
+if they stoop to woo his purse.  He has, on hearing how that poets bring
+praise to nations, as in fact he can now understand his Shakespeare to
+have done, been seen to thump the midriff and rally them for their
+shyness of it, telling them he doubts them true poets while they abstain
+from singing him to the world-him, and the things refreshing the centre
+of him.  Ineffectual is that encouragement.  Were he in the fire, melting
+to the iron man, the backbone of him, it would be different.  At his
+pleasures he is anti-hymnic, repellent to song.  He has perceived the
+virtues of Peace, without the brother eye for the need of virtuousness to
+make good use of them and inspire the poet.  His own enrolled
+unrhythmical bardic troops (humorous mercenaries when Celts) do his
+trumpeting best, and offend not the Pierides.
+
+This interlude, or rather inter-drone, repulsive to write, can hardly be
+excluded from a theme dramatising Celtic views, and treating of a blood,
+to which the idea of country must shine resplendently if we would have it
+running at full tide through the arteries.  Preserve your worship, if the
+object fills your optics.  Better worship that than nothing, as it is
+better for flames to be blown out than not to ascend, otherwise it will
+wreak circular mischief instead of illumining.  You are requested simply
+to recollect that there is another beside you who sees the object
+obliquely, and then you will not be surprised by his irreverence.  What
+if, in the end, you were conducted to a like point of view? Self-worship,
+it has been said, is preferable to no trimming of the faculty, but
+worship does not necessarily cease with the extinction of this of
+the voraciously carnal.  An ideal of country, of Great Britain, is
+conceivable that will be to the taste of Celt and Saxon in common, to
+wave as a standard over their fraternal marching.  Let Bull boo his
+drumliest at such talk: it is, I protest, the thing we want and can have.
+He is the obstruction, not the country; and against him, not against the
+country, the shots are aimed which seem so malignant.  Him the gay
+manipulators propitiate who look at him through Literature and the Press,
+and across the pulpit-cushions, like airy Macheath at Society, as carrion
+to batten on.  May plumpness be their portion, and they never hanged for
+it!  But the flattering, tickling, pleasantly pinching of Bull is one of
+those offices which the simple starveling piper regards with afresh
+access of appetite for the well-picked bone of his virtue.  That ghastly
+apparition of the fleshly present is revealed to him as a dead whale,
+having the harpoon of the inevitable slayer of the merely fleshly in his
+oils.  To humour him, and be his piper for his gifts, is to descend to a
+carnival deep underneath.  While he reigns, thinks this poor starveling,
+Rome burns, or the explosive powders are being secretly laid.  He and his
+thousand Macheaths are dancing the country the giddy pace, and there
+will, the wretch dreads, be many a crater of scoria in the island, before
+he stretches his inanimate length, his parasites upon him.  The theme is
+chosen and must be treated as a piper involved in his virtue conceives
+it: that is, realistically; not with Bull's notion of the realism of the
+butcher's shop and the pendent legs of mutton and blocks of beef painted
+raw and glaring in their streaks, but with the realism of the active
+brain and heart conjoined.  The reasons for the division of Celt and
+Saxon, what they think and say of one another, often without knowing that
+they are divided, and the wherefore of our abusing of ourselves, brave
+England, our England of the ancient fortitude and the future incarnation,
+can afford to hear.  Why not in a tale?  It is he, your all for animal
+pleasure in the holiday he devours and cannot enjoy, whose example
+teaches you to shun the plaguey tale that carries fright: and so you find
+him sour at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because he
+harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the smallest
+admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp a little over his work,
+and allow his pleasures to inspire a dose of thoughtfulness, he would be
+happier, and--who knows?-become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued from
+the pole-axe.
+
+Now the rain is over, your carriage is at the door, the country smiles
+and the wet highway waves a beckoning hand.  We have worn through a cloud
+with cloudy discourses, but we are in a land of shifting weathers,
+'coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum,' not every chapter can be
+sunshine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CROSSING THE RUBICON
+
+Rough weather on the Irish sea discharged a pallid file of passengers
+from the boat at Holyhead just as the morning sun struck wave and
+mountain with one of the sudden sparkling changes which our South-welters
+have in their folds to tell us after a tumultuous night that we have only
+been worried by Puck.  The scene of frayed waters all rosy-golden, and
+golden-banded heathery height, with the tinted sand, breaking to flights
+of blue, was resplendent for those of our recent sea-farers who could
+lift an eye to enjoy it.  Freshness, illumination, then salt air, vivid
+distances, were a bath for every sense of life.  You could believe the
+breast of the mountain to be heaving, the billows to be kissing fingers
+to him, the rollers shattered up the cliff to have run to extinction to
+scale him.  He seemed in his clear-edged mass King of this brave new
+boundless world built in a minute out of the wreck of the old.
+
+An hour back the vessel was labouring through rueful chasms under
+darkness, and then did the tricksy Southwest administer grisly slaps to
+right and left, whizzing spray across the starboard beam, and drenching
+the locks of a young lady who sat cloaked and hooded in frieze to teach
+her wilfulness a lesson, because she would keep her place on deck from
+beginning to end of the voyage.  Her faith in the capacity of Irish
+frieze to turn a deluge of the deeps driven by an Atlantic gale was
+shaken by the time she sighted harbour, especially when she shed showers
+by flapping a batlike wing of the cloak, and had a slight shudder to find
+herself trickling within.
+
+'Dear!  and I'm wet to the skin,' she confided the fact to herself
+vocally.
+
+'You would not be advised,' a gentleman beside her said after a delicate
+pause to let her impulsive naturalism of utterance fly by unwounded.
+
+'And aren't you the same and worse?  And not liking it either, I fear,
+Sir!' she replied, for despite a manful smile his complexion was tell-
+tale.  'But there 's no harm in salt.  But you should have gone down to
+the cabin with Father Boyle and you would have been sure of not catching
+cold.  But, Oh!  the beautiful .  .  .  look at it!  And it's my first
+view of England.  Well, then, I'll say it's a beautiful country.'
+
+Her companion looked up at the lighted sky, and down at the pools in
+tarpaulin at his feet.  He repressed a disposition to shudder, and with
+the anticipated ecstasy of soon jumping out of wet clothes into dry, he
+said: 'I should like to be on the top of that hill now.'
+
+The young lady's eyes flew to the top.
+
+'They say he looks on Ireland; I love him; and his name is Caer Gybi; and
+it was one of our Saints gave him the name, I 've read in books.  I'll be
+there before noon.'
+
+'You want to have a last gaze over to Erin?'
+
+'No, it's to walk and feel the breeze.  But I do, though.'
+
+'Won't you require a little rest?'
+
+'Sure and I've had it sitting here all night!' said she.
+
+He laughed: the reason for the variation of exercise was conclusive.
+
+Father Boyle came climbing up the ladder, uncertain of his legs; he
+rolled and snatched and tottered on his way to them, and accepted the
+gentleman's help of an arm, saying: 'Thank ye, thank ye, and good
+morning, Mr. Colesworth.  And my poor child!  what sort of a night has
+it been above, Kathleen?'
+
+He said it rather twinkling, and she retorted:
+
+'What sort of a night has it been below, Father Boyle?' Her twinkle was
+livelier than his, compassionate in archness.
+
+'Purgatory past is good for contemplation, my dear.  'Tis past, and
+there's the comfort!  You did well to be out of that herring-barrel,
+Mr. Colesworth.  I hadn't the courage, or I would have burst from it to
+take a ducking with felicity.  I haven't thrown up my soul; that's the
+most I can say.  I thought myself nigh on it once or twice.  And an
+amazing kind steward it was, or I'd have counted the man for some one
+else.  Surely 'tis a glorious morning?'
+
+Mr. Colesworth responded heartily in praise of the morning.  He was
+beginning to fancy that he felt the warmth of spring sunshine on his
+back.  He flung up his head and sniffed the air, and was very like a
+horse fretful for the canter; so like as to give Miss Kathleen an idea of
+the comparison.  She could have rallied him; her laughing eyes showed the
+readiness, but she forbore, she drank the scene.  Her face, with the
+threaded locks about forehead and cheeks, and the dark, the blue, the
+rosy red of her lips, her eyes, her hair, was just such a south-western
+sky as April drove above her, the same in colour and quickness; and much
+of her spirit was the same, enough to stand for a resemblance.  But who
+describes the spirit?  No one at the gates of the field of youth.  When
+Time goes reaping he will gather us a sheaf, out of which the picture
+springs.
+
+'There's our last lurch, glory to the breakwater!' exclaimed Father
+Boyle, as the boat pitched finally outside the harbour fence, where a
+soft calm swell received them with the greeting of civilised sea-nymphs.
+'The captain'll have a quieter passage across.  You may spy him on the
+pier.  We'll be meeting him on the landing.'
+
+'If he's not in bed, from watching the stars all night,' said Miss
+Kathleen.
+
+'He must have had a fifty-lynx power of sight for that, my dear.'
+
+'They did appear, though, and wonderfully bright,' she said.  'I saw them
+come out and go in.  It's not all cloud when the high wind blows.'
+
+'You talk like a song, Kathleen.'
+
+'Couldn't I rattle a throat if I were at home, Father!'
+
+'Ah!  we're in the enemy's country now.'
+
+Miss Kathleen said she would go below to get the handbags from the
+stewardess.
+
+Mr. Colesworth's brows had a little darkened over the Rev. Gentleman's
+last remark.  He took two or three impatient steps up and down with his
+head bent.  'Pardon me; I hoped we had come to a better understanding,'
+he said.  'Is it quite fair to the country and to Miss O'Donnell to
+impress on her before she knows us that England is the enemy?'
+
+'Habit, Mr. Colesworth, habit!  we've got accustomed to the perspective
+and speak accordingly.  There's a breach visible.'
+
+'I thought you agreed with me that good efforts are being made on our
+side to mend the breach.'
+
+'Sir, you have a noble minority at work, no doubt; and I take you for one
+of the noblest, as not objecting to stand next to alone.'
+
+'I really thought, judging from our conversation at Mrs. O'Donnell's that
+evening, that you were going to hold out a hand and lead your flock to
+the right sort of fellowship with us.'
+
+'To submission to the laws, Mr. Colesworth; 'tis my duty to do it as
+pastor and citizen.'
+
+'No, to more than that, sir.  You spoke with friendly warmth.'
+
+'The atmosphere was genial, if you remember the whisky and the fumes of
+our tobacco at one o'clock!'
+
+'I shall recollect the evening with the utmost pleasure.  You were kind
+enough to instruct me in a good many things I shall be sure to profit by.
+I wish I could have spent more time in Ireland.  As it is, I like
+Irishmen so well that if the whole land were in revolt I should never
+call it the enemy's country.'
+
+'Excellently spoken, Mr. Colesworth,' said the priest.  'We 'll hope your
+writings may do service to mend the breach.  For there is one, as you
+know, and more 's the pity; there's one, and it's wide and deep.  As my
+friend Captain Con O'Donnell says, it's plain to the naked eye as a pair
+of particularly fat laundry drawers hung out to dry and ballooned in
+extension--if mayhap you've ever seen the sight of them in that state:--
+just held together by a narrow neck of thread or button, and stretching
+away like a corpulent frog in the act of swimming on the wind.  His
+comparison touches the sentiment of disunion, sir.'
+
+Mr. Colesworth had not ever seen such a pair of laundry drawers inflated
+to symbolise the breach between Ireland and England; nor probably, if he
+had, would the sentiment of national disunion have struck his mind: it
+was difficult to him in the description.  He considered his Rev. friend
+to be something of a slippery fish, while Father Boyle's opinion of him
+likewise referred him to an elemental substance, of slow movement-earth,
+in short: for he continued to look argumentative after all had been said.
+
+Or perhaps he threw a coveting eye on sweet Miss Kathleen and had his own
+idea of mending a stitch of the breach in a quite domestic way.  If so,
+the Holy Father would have a word to say, let alone Kathleen.  The maids
+of his Church do not espouse her foes.  For the men it is another matter:
+that is as the case may be.  Temporarily we are in cordial intercourse,
+Mr. Colesworth.
+
+Miss Kathleen returned to deck carrying her bags.  The gentleman had to
+descend, and subsequently an amiable dissension arose on the part of the
+young lady and Mr. Colesworth.  She, however, yielded one of her bags,
+and he, though doubly laden, was happy.  All very transparent to pastoral
+observation, but why should they not be left to their chirruping
+youthfulness?  The captain was not in view, and Father Boyle wanted to
+go to bed for refreshment, and Kathleen was an airy gossamer, with a boy
+running after it, not by any means likely to catch it, or to keep it if
+he did.  Proceed and trip along, you young ones!
+
+At the hotel they heard that Captain Con O'Donnell was a snug sleeper
+upstairs.  This, the captain himself very soon informed them, had not
+been the kernel of the truth.  He had fancied they would not cross the
+Channel on so rattlesome a night, or Kathleen would have had an Irish
+kiss to greet her landing in England.  But the cousinly salute was little
+delayed, news of the family in Ireland and England was exchanged, and
+then Mr. Colesworth and the captain bowed to an introduction; and the
+captain, at mention of his name, immediately cried out that Mr.
+Colesworth might perchance be a relative of the highly intelligent
+admirable lady who had undertaken the secretaryship, and by her vast
+ability got the entire management, of Miss Mattock's benevolent
+institution, and was conducting it with such success that it was fast
+becoming a grief to the generous heart of the foundress of the same to
+find it not only self-paying, but on the road to a fortune, inasmuch as
+it was already an article in the decrees of fashion among the nobility
+and gentry of both sexes in the metropolis to have their linen and laces
+washed at the Mattock laundry.
+
+Mr. Colesworth said he was the brother of the lady in question, he had
+also the pleasure of an acquaintance with Miss Mattock.  He was
+vehemently congratulated on the relationship, which bore witness, the
+captain armed, to a certain hereditary share of brains greatly to be
+envied: brother of Miss Colesworth, a title of distinction in itself!
+He was congratulated not less cordially for his being so fortunate as to
+know Miss Mattock, one of a million.
+
+Captain Con retained the hand of Father Boyle and squeezed it during his
+eulogies, at the same time dispensing nods and winks and sunny sparkles
+upon Kathleen.  Mr. Colesworth went upstairs to his room not unflattered.
+The flattery enveloped him in the pleasant sense of a somehow now
+established companionship for the day with a pleasant person from
+whom he did not wish to separate.
+
+'You made the gentleman's acquaintance, my dear .  .  . ?' said Con.
+
+Kathleen answered: 'He made friends with our Patrick on the Continent,
+I think it was in Germany, and came to us to study the old country,
+bearing a letter from Patrick.  He means to be one of their writers on
+the newspapers.  He studies everything; he has written books.  He called
+on us coming and called on us going and we came over together,' said Miss
+Kathleen.  'But tell me: our Philip?'
+
+'Books!' Con exclaimed.  'It's hard to discover a man in these days who
+hasn't written books.  Oh!  Philip!  Ease your heart about Philip.
+They're nursing him, round.  He was invalided at the right moment for
+him, no fear.  I gave him his chance of the last vacant seat up to the
+last hour, and now the die is cast and this time I 'm off to it.  Poor
+Philip--yes, yes!  we 're sorry to see him flat all his length, we love
+him; he's a gallant soldier; alive to his duty; and that bludgeon sun of
+India knocked him down, and that fall from his horse finished the
+business, and there he lies.  But he'll get up, and he might have
+accepted the seat and spared me my probation: he's not married, I am,
+I have a wife, and Master Philip divides me against my domestic self,
+he does.  But let that be: I serve duty too.  Not a word to our friend up
+yonder.  It's a secret with a time-fuse warranted to explode safe enough
+when the minutes are up, and make a powerful row when it does.  It is all
+right over there, Father Boyle, I suppose?'
+
+'A walk over!  a pure ceremonial,' said the priest, and he yawned
+frightfully.
+
+'You're for a nap to recompose you, my dear friend,' remarked the
+captain.
+
+'But you haven't confided anything of it to Mrs. Adister?'
+
+'Not a syllable; no.  That's to come.  There's my contest!  I had urgent
+business in Ireland, and she 's a good woman, always willing to let me
+go.  I count on her kindness, there 's no mightier compliment to one's
+wife.  She'll know it when it's history.  She's fond of history.  Ay, she
+hates fiction, and so I'm proud to tell her I offer her none.  She likes
+a trifling surprise too, and there she has it.  Oh!  we can whip up the
+business to a nice little bowl of froth-flummery.  But it's when the
+Parliamentary voting is on comes the connubial pull.  She's a good woman,
+a dear good soul, but she's a savage patriot; and Philip might have saved
+his kinsman if he had liked.  He had only to say the word: I could have
+done all the business for him, and no contest to follow by my fireside.
+He's on his couch--Mars convalescent: a more dreadful attraction to the
+ladies than in his crimson plumes!  If the fellow doesn't let slip his
+opportunity!  with his points of honour and being an Irish Bayard.  Why
+Bayard in the nineteenth century's a Bedlamite, Irish or no.  So I tell
+him.  There he is; you'll see him, Kathleen: and one of them as big an
+heiress as any in England.  Philip's no fool, you'll find.'
+
+'Then he's coming all right, is he?' said Kathleen.
+
+'He 's a soldier, and a good one, but he 's nothing more, and as for
+patriotic inflammation, doesn't know the sensation.'
+
+'Oh! but he's coming round, and you'll go and stroke down mother with
+that,' Kathleen cried.  'Her heart's been heavy, with Patrick wandering
+and Philip on his back.  I'll soon be dressed for breakfast.'
+
+Away she went.
+
+'She's got an appetite, and looks like a strapped bit of steel after the
+night's tumbling,' said the captain, seeing her trip aloft.  'I'm young
+as that too, or not far off it.  Stay, I'll order breakfast for four in a
+quiet corner where we can converse--which, by the way, won't be possible
+in the presence of that gaping oyster of a fellow, who looks as if he
+were waiting the return of the tide.'
+
+Father Boyle interposed his hand.
+
+'Not for .  .  .' he tried to add 'four.' The attempt at a formation of
+the word produced a cavernous yawn a volume of the distressful deep to
+the beholder.
+
+'Of course,' Captain Con assented.  He proposed bed and a sedative
+therein, declaring that his experience overnight could pronounce it good,
+and that it should be hot.  So he led his tired old friend to the
+bedroom, asked dozens of questions, flurried a withdrawal of them,
+suggested the answers, talked of his Rubicon, praised his wife, delivered
+a moan on her behalf, and after assisting to half disrobe the scarce
+animate figure, which lent itself like an artist's lay-model to the
+operation, departed on his mission of the sedative.
+
+At the breakfast for three he was able to tell Kathleen that the worthy
+Father was warm, and on his way to complete restoration.
+
+'Full fathom five the Father lies, in the ocean of sleep, by this time,'
+said Con.  'And 'tis a curious fact that every man in that condition
+seems enviable to men on their legs.  And similarly with death; we'd
+rather not, because of a qualm, but the picture of the finish of the leap
+across is a taking one.  These chops are done as if Nature had mellowed
+their juiciness.'
+
+'They are so nice,' Kathleen said.
+
+'You deserve them, if ever girl in this world!'
+
+'I sat on deck all night, and Mr. Colesworth would keep me company.'
+
+'He could hardly do less, having the chance.  But that notwithstanding,
+I'm under an obligation to your cavalier.  And how did you find Ireland,
+sir?  You've made acquaintance with my cousin, young Mr. Patrick
+O'Donnell, I rejoice to hear.'
+
+'Yes, through his hearing or seeing my name and suspecting I had a
+sister,' said Mr. Colesworth, who was no longer in the resemblance of a
+gaping oyster on the borders of the ebb.  'The country is not disturbed.'
+
+'So the doctor thinks his patient is doing favourably!  And you cottoned
+to Patrick?  And I don't wonder.  Where was it?'
+
+'We met in Trieste.  He was about to start by one of the Austrian boats
+for the East.'
+
+'Not disturbed!  no!  with a rotten potato inside it paralysing
+digestion!' exclaimed Con.  'Now Patrick had been having a peep at
+Vienna, hadn't he?'
+
+'He had; he was fresh from Vienna when I met him.  As to Ireland, the
+harvest was only middling good last year.'
+
+'And that's the bit of luck we depend on.  A cloud too much, and it's
+drowned!  Had he seen, do you know, anybody in Vienna?--you were not long
+together at Trieste?'
+
+Mr. Colesworth had sufficient quickness to perceive that the two
+questions could be answered as one, and saying: 'He was disappointed,'
+revealed that he and Patrick had been long enough together to come to
+terms of intimacy.
+
+'To be sure, he gave you a letter of introduction to his family!' said
+Con.  'And permit me to add, that Patrick's choice of a friend is mine
+on trust.  The lady he was for seeing, Mr. Colesworth, was just then
+embarking on an adventure of a romantic character, particularly well
+suited to her nature, and the end of it was a trifle sanguinary, and
+she suffered a disappointment also, though not perhaps on that account.'
+
+'I heard of it in England last year,' said Mr. Colesworth.  'Did she come
+through it safely?'
+
+'Without any personal disfigurement: and is in England now, under her
+father's roof, meditating fresh adventures.'
+
+Kathleen cried: 'Ye 're talking of the lady who was Miss Adister--I can
+guess--Ah!' She humped her shoulders and sent a shudder up her neck.
+
+'But she's a grand creature, Mr. Colesworth, and you ought to know her,'
+said Con.  'That is, if you'd like to have an idea of a young Catherine
+or a Semiramisminus an army and a country.  There's nothing she's not
+capable of aiming at.  And there's pretty well nothing and nobody she
+wouldn't make use of.  She has great notions of the power of the British
+Press and the British purse--each in turn as a key to the other.  Now for
+an egg, Kathleen.'
+
+'I think I'll eat an egg,' Kathleen replied.
+
+'Bless the honey heart of the girl!  Life's in you, my dear, and calls
+for fuel.  I'm glad to see that Mr. Colesworth too can take a sight at
+the Sea-God after a night of him.  It augurs magnificently for a future
+career.  And let me tell you that the Pen demands it of us.  The first of
+the requisites is a stout stomach--before a furnished head!  I'd not pass
+a man to be anything of a writer who couldn't step ashore from a tempest
+and consume his Titan breakfast.'
+
+'We are qualifying for the literary craft, Miss O'Donnell,' said Mr.
+Colesworth.
+
+'It's for a walk in the wind up Caer Gybi, and along the coast I mean to
+go,' said Kathleen.
+
+'This morning?' the captain asked her.
+
+She saw his dilemma in his doubtful look.
+
+'When I've done.  While you're discussing matters with Father Boyle.
+I--know you're burning to.  Sure it's yourself knows as well as anybody,
+Captain Con, that I can walk a day long and take care of my steps.  I've
+walked the better half of Donegal alone, and this morning I'll have a
+protector.'
+
+Captain Con eyed the protector, approved of him, disapproved of himself,
+thought of Kathleen as a daughter of Erin--a privileged and inviolate
+order of woman in the minds of his countrymen--and wriggling internally
+over a remainder scruple said: 'Mr. Colesworth mayhap has to write a bit
+in the morning.'
+
+'I'm unattached at present,' the latter said.  'I am neither a
+correspondent nor a reporter, and if I were, the event would be wanting.'
+
+'That remark, sir, shows you to be eminently a stranger to the official
+duties,' observed the captain.  'Journalism is a maw, and the journalist
+has to cram it, and like anything else which perpetually distends for
+matter, it must be filled, for you can't leave it gaping, so when nature
+and circumstance won't combine to produce the stuff, we have recourse to
+the creative arts.  'Tis the necessity of the profession.'
+
+'The profession will not impose that necessity upon me,' remarked the
+young practitioner.
+
+'Outside the wheels of the machine, sir, we indulge our hallucination of
+immunity.  I've been one in the whirr of them, relating what I hadn't
+quite heard, and capitulating what I didn't think at all, in spite of the
+cry of my conscience--a poor infant below the waters, casting up
+ejaculatory bubbles of protestation.  And if it is my reproach that I
+left it to the perils of drowning, it's my pride that I continued to
+transmit air enough to carry on the struggle.  Not every journalist can
+say as much.  The Press is the voice of the mass, and our private opinion
+is detected as a discord by the mighty beast, and won't be endured by
+him.'
+
+'It's better not to think of him quite as a beast,' said Mr. Colesworth.
+
+'Infinitely better: and I like your "guile," sir: But wait and tell me
+what you think of him after tossing him his meat for a certain number of
+years.  There's Rockney.  Do you know Rockney?  He's the biggest single
+gun they've got, and he's mad for this country, but ask him about the
+public, you'll hear the menagerie-keeper's opinion of the brute that
+mauled his loins.'
+
+'Rockney,' said Mr. Colesworth, 'has the tone of a man disappointed of
+the dictatorship.'
+
+'Then you do know Rockney!' shouted Captain Con.  'That's the man in a
+neat bit of drawing.  He's a grand piece of ordnance.  But wait for him
+too, and tell me by and by.  If it isn't a woman, you'll find, that
+primes him, ay, and points him, and what's more, discharges him, I'm not
+Irish born.  Poor fellow!  I pity him.  He had a sweet Irish lady for his
+wife, and lost her last year, and has been raging astray politically ever
+since.  I suppose it's hardly the poor creature's fault.  None the less,
+you know, we have to fight him.  And now he 's nibbling at a bait--it 's
+fun: the lady I mentioned, with a turn for adventure and enterprise: it's
+rare fun: he 's nibbling, he'll be hooked.  You must make her
+acquaintance, Mr. Colesworth, and hold your own against her, if you can.
+She's a niece of my wife's and I'll introduce you.  I shall find her in
+London, or at our lodgings at a Surrey farm we've taken to nurse my
+cousin Captain Philip O'Donnell invalided from Indian awful climate!--
+on my return, when I hope to renew the acquaintance.  She has beauty,
+she has brains.  Resist her, and you 'll make a decent stand against
+Lucifer.  And supposing she rolls you up and pitches you over, her
+noticing you is a pretty compliment to your pen.  That 'll be consoling.'
+
+Mr. Colesworth fancied, he said, that he was proof against feminine
+blandishments in the direction of his writings.
+
+He spoke as one indicating a thread to suggest a cable.  The captain
+applauded the fancy as a pleasing delusion of the young sprigs of
+Journalism.
+
+Upon this, Mr. Colesworth, with all respect for French intelligence,
+denied the conclusiveness of French generalisations, which ascribed to
+women universal occult dominion, and traced all great affairs to small
+intrigues.
+
+The captain's eyes twinkled on him, thinking how readily he would back
+smart Miss Kathleen to do the trick, if need were.
+
+He said to her before she started: 'Don't forget he may be a clever
+fellow with that pen of his, and useful to our party.'
+
+'I'll not forget,' said she.
+
+For the good of his party, then, Captain Con permitted her to take the
+walk up Caer Gybi alone with Mr. Colesworth: a memorable walk in the
+recollections of the scribe, because of the wonderful likeness of the
+young lady to the breezy weather and the sparkles over the deep, the
+cloud that frowned, the cloud that glowed, the green of the earth
+greening out from under wings of shadow, the mountain ranges holding
+hands about an immensity of space.  It was one of our giant days to his
+emotions, and particularly memorable to him through the circumstance that
+it insisted on a record in verse, and he was unused to the fetters of
+metre: and although the verse was never seen by man, his attempt at it
+confused his ideas of his expressive powers.  Oddly too, while scourging
+the lines with criticism, he had a fondness for them: they stamped a
+radiant day in his mind, beyond the resources of rhetoric to have done it
+equally.
+
+This was the day of Captain Con's crossing the Rubicon between the secret
+of his happiness and a Parliamentary career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER
+
+Women may be able to tell you why the nursing of a military invalid
+awakens tenderer anxieties in their bosoms than those called forth by
+the drab civilian.  If we are under sentence of death we are all of us
+pathetic of course; but stretched upon the debateable couch of sickness
+we are not so touching as the coloured coat: it has the distinction
+belonging to colour.  It smites a deeper nerve, or more than one; and
+this, too, where there is no imaginary subjection to the charms of
+military glory, in minds to which the game of war is lurid as the plumes
+of the arch-slayer.
+
+Jane Mattock assisting Mrs. Adister O'Donnell to restore Captain Philip
+was very singularly affected, like a person shut off on a sudden from her
+former theories and feelings.  Theoretically she despised the soldier's
+work as much as she shrank abhorrently from bloodshed.  She regarded him
+and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and could peruse
+platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm.  The soldier personally, she
+was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence: a sort of schoolboy
+when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly limited creature, not
+a member of our broader world.  Without dismissing any of these views
+she found them put aside for the reception of others of an opposite
+character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to her cares of
+nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful, even
+prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for the
+country.  If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers, here was
+one whom it would be grievous to lose.  He had fallen for the country;
+and there was a moving story of how he had fallen.  She inclined to think
+more highly of him for having courted exposure on a miserable frontier
+war where but a poor sheaf of glory could be gathered.  And he seemed to
+estimate his professional duties apart from an aim at the laurels.  A
+conception of the possibility of a man's being both a soldier and morally
+a hero edged its way into her understanding.  It stood edgeways within,
+desirous of avoiding a challenge to show every feature.
+
+The cares of nursing were Jane's almost undividedly, except for the aid
+she had from her friend Grace Barrow and from Miss Colesworth.  Mrs.
+Adister O'Donnell was a nurse in name only.  'She'll be seen by Philip
+like as if she were a nightmare apparition of his undertaker's wraith,'
+Captain Con said to Jane, when recommending his cousin to her charitable
+nature, after he had taken lodgings at a farmhouse near Mrs. Lackstraw's
+model farm Woodside on the hills.  'Barring the dress,' as he added, some
+such impression of her frigid mournfulness might have struck a recumbent
+invalid.  Jane acknowledged it, and at first induced her aunt to join her
+in the daily walk of half a mile to sit with him.  Mrs. Lackstraw was a
+very busy lady at her farm; she was often summoned to London by her
+intuition of John's wish to have her presiding at table for the
+entertainment of his numerous guests; she confessed that she supervised
+the art of nursing better than she practised it, and supervision can be
+done at a distance if the subordinate is properly attentive to the rules
+we lay down, as Jane appeared to be.  So Jane was left to him.  She loved
+the country; Springtide in the country set her singing; her walk to her
+patient at Lappett's farm and homeward was an aethereal rapture for a
+heart rocking easy in fulness.  There was nothing to trouble it, no hint
+of wild winds and heavy seas, not even the familiar insinuation from the
+vigilant monitress, her aunt, to bid her be on her guard, beware of what
+it is that great heiresses are courted for, steel her heart against
+serpent speeches, see well to have the woman's precious word No at the
+sentinel's post, and alert there.  Mrs. Lackstraw, the most vigilant and
+plain-spoken of her sex, had forborne to utter the usual warnings which
+were to preserve Miss Mattock for her future Earl or Duke and the reason
+why she forbore was a double one; a soldier and Papist could never be
+thought perilous to a young woman scorning the sons of Mars and slaves
+of sacerdotalism.  The picture of Jane bestowing her hand on a Roman
+Catholic in military uniform, refused to be raised before the mind.
+Charitableness, humaneness, the fact that she was an admirable nurse and
+liked to exercise her natural gift, perfectly accounted for Jane's trips
+to Lappett's farm, and the jellies and fresh dairy dainties and neat
+little dishes she was constantly despatching to the place.  A suggestion
+of possible danger might prove more dangerous than silence, by rendering
+it attractive.  Besides, Jane talked of poor Captain Philip as Patrick
+O'Donnell's brother, whom she was bound to serve in return for Patrick's
+many services to her; and of how unlike Patrick he was.  Mrs. Lackstraw
+had been apprehensive about her fancy for Patrick.  Therefore if Captain
+Philip was unlike him, and strictly a Catholic, according to report, the
+suspicion of danger dispersed, and she was allowed to enjoy the pleasures
+of the metropolis as frequently as she chose.  The nursing of a man of
+Letters, or of the neighbour to him, a beggar in rags, would not have
+been so tolerated.  Thus we perceive that wits actively awake inside the
+ring-fence of prepossessions they have erected may lull themselves with
+their wakefulness.  Who would have thought!--is the cry when the
+strongest bulwark of the fence is broken through.
+
+Jane least of any would have thought what was coming to pass.  The pale
+square-browed young officer, so little Irish and winning in his brevity
+of speech, did and said nothing to alarm her or strike the smallest
+light.  Grace Barrow noticed certain little changes of mood in Jane she
+could scarcely have had a distinct suspicion at the time.  After a recent
+observation of him, on an evening stroll from Lappett's to Woodside, she
+pronounced him interesting, but hard.  'He has an interesting head . . .
+I should not like to offend him.' They agreed as to his unlikeness to
+fluid Patrick; both eulogistic of the absent brother; and Jane, who could
+be playful in privacy with friends, clapped a brogue on her tongue to
+discourse of Patrick and apostrophise him: 'Oh!  Pat, Pat, my dear cousin
+Pat! why are you so long away from your desponding Jane?  I 'll take to
+poetry and write songs, if you don't come home soon.  You've put seas
+between us, and are behaving to me as an enemy.  I know you 'll bring
+home a foreign Princess to break the heart of your faithful.  But I'll
+always praise you for a dear boy, Pat, and wish you happy, and beg the
+good gentleman your brother to give me a diploma as nurse to your first-
+born.  There now!'
+
+She finished smiling brightly, and Grace was a trifle astonished, for her
+friend's humour was not as a rule dramatic.
+
+'You really have caught a twang of it from your friend Captain Con; only
+you don't rattle the eighteenth letter of the alphabet in the middle of
+words.'
+
+'I've tried, and can't persuade my tongue to do it "first off," as boys
+say, and my invalid has no brogue whatever to keep me in practice,' Jane
+replied.  'One wonders what he thinks of as he lies there by the window.
+He doesn't confide it to his hospital nurse.'
+
+'Yes, he would treat her courteously, just in that military style,' said
+Grace, realising the hospital attendance.
+
+'It 's the style I like best:--no perpetual personal thankings and
+allusions to the trouble he gives!' Jane exclaimed.  'He shows perfect
+good sense, and I like that in all things, as you know.  A red-haired
+young woman chooses to wait on him and bring him flowers--he's brother
+to Patrick in his love of wild flowers, at all events!--and he takes it
+naturally and simply.  These officers bear illness well.  I suppose
+it 's the drill.'
+
+'Still I think it a horrid profession, dear.'
+
+Grace felt obliged to insist on that: and her 'I think,' though it was
+not stressed, tickled Jane's dormant ear to some drowsy wakefulness.
+
+'I think too much honour is paid to it, certainly.  But soldiers, of all
+men, one would expect to be overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness.  He has
+never complained; not once.  I doubt if he would have complained if Mrs.
+Adister had been waiting on him all the while, or not a soul.  I can
+imagine him lying on the battle-field night after night quietly,
+resolving not to groan.'
+
+'Too great a power of self-repression sometimes argues the want of any
+emotional nature,' said Grace.
+
+Jane shook her head.  She knew a story of him contradicting that.
+
+The story had not recurred to her since she had undertaken her service.
+It coloured the remainder of an evening walk home through the beechwoods
+and over the common with Grace, and her walk across the same tracks early
+in the morning, after Grace had gone to London.  Miss Colesworth was
+coming to her next week, with her brother if he had arrived in England.
+Jane remembered having once been curious about this adventurous man of
+Letters who lived by the work of his pen.  She remembered comparing him
+to one who was compelled to swim perpetually without a ship to give him
+rest or land in view.  He had made a little money by a book, and was
+expending it on travels--rather imprudently, she fancied Emma Colesworth
+to be thinking.  He talked well, but for the present she was happier in
+her prospect of nearly a week of loneliness.  The day was one of
+sunshine, windless, odorous: one of the rare placid days of April when
+the pettish month assumes a matronly air of summer and wears it till the
+end of the day.  The beech twigs were strongly embrowned, the larches
+shot up green spires by the borders of woods and on mounds within, deep
+ditchbanks unrolled profuse tangles of new blades, and sharp eyes might
+light on a late white violet overlooked by the children; primroses ran
+along the banks.  Jane had a maxim that flowers should be spared to live
+their life, especially flowers of the wilds; she had reared herself on
+our poets; hence Mrs. Lackstraw's dread of the arrival of one of the
+minstrel order: and the girl, who could deliberately cut a bouquet from
+the garden, if requested, would refuse to pluck a wildflower.  But now
+they cried out to her to be plucked in hosts, they claimed the sacrifice,
+and it seemed to her no violation of her sentiment to gather handfuls
+making a bunch that would have done honour to the procession of the
+children's May-day--a day she excused for the slaughter because her idol
+and prophet among the poets, wild nature's interpreter, was that day on
+the side of the children.  How like a bath of freshness would the thick
+faintly-fragrant mass shine to her patient!  Only to look at it was
+medicine!  She believed, in her lively healthfulness, that the look would
+give him a spring to health, and she hurried forward to have them in
+water-the next sacred obligation to the leaving of them untouched.
+
+She had reared herself on our poets.  If much brooding on them will
+sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that
+also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and as
+her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and
+accurate judgement, they rather tended to stamp her character than lead
+her into foolishness.  Blunt of speech, quick in sensibility,
+imaginative, yet idealistic, she had the complex character of diverse
+brain and nerve, and was often a problem to the chief person interested
+in it.  She thought so decisively, felt so shrinkingly; spoke so flatly,
+brooded so softly!  Such natures, in the painful effort to reconcile
+apparent antagonism and read themselves, forget that they are not full
+grown.  Longer than others are they young: but meanwhile they are of an
+age when we are driven abroad to seek and shape our destinies.
+
+Passing through the garden-gate of Lappett's farm she made her way to the
+south-western face of the house to beg a bowl of water of the farmer's
+wife, and had the sweet surprise of seeing her patient lying under
+swallows' eaves on a chair her brother had been commissioned to send
+from London for coming uses.  He was near the farm-wife's kitchen, but to
+windward of the cooking-reek, pleasantly warmed, sufficiently shaded, and
+alone, with open letter on the rug covering his legs.  He whistled to
+Jane's dog Wayland, a retriever, having Newfoundland relationships, of
+smithy redness and ruggedness; it was the whistle that startled her to
+turn and see him as she was in the act of handing Mrs. Lappett her
+primroses.
+
+'Out?  I feared it would be a week.  Is it quite prudent?'  Jane said,
+toning down her delight.
+
+He answered with the half-smile that refers these questions to the
+settled fact.  Air had always brought him round; now he could feel he
+was embarked for recovery: and he told her how the farmer and one of his
+men had lent a shoulder to present him to his old and surest physician--
+rather like a crippled ghost.  M. Adister was upstairs in bed with one of
+her headaches.  Captain Con, then, was attending her, Jane supposed: She
+spoke of him as the most devoted of husbands.
+
+A slight hardening of Philip's brows, well-known to her by this time,
+caused her to interrogate his eyes.  They were fixed on her in his manner
+of gazing with strong directness.  She read the contrary opinion, and
+some hieroglyphic matter besides.
+
+'We all respect him for his single-hearted care of her,' she said.
+'I have a great liking for him.  His tirades about the Saxon tyrant are
+not worth mentioning, they mean nothing.  He would be one of the first to
+rush to the standard if there were danger; I know he would.  He is truly
+chivalrous, I am sure.'
+
+Philip's broad look at her had not swerved.  The bowl of primroses placed
+beside him on a chair by the farmer's dame diverted it for a moment.
+
+'You gathered them?' he said.
+
+Jane drank his look at the flowers.
+
+'Yes, on my way,' she replied.  'We can none of us live for ever; and
+fresh water every day will keep them alive a good long time.  They had it
+from the clouds yesterday.  Do they not seem a bath of country
+happiness!'  Evidently they did their service in pleasing him.
+
+Seeing his fingers grope on the rug, she handed him his open letters.
+
+He selected the second, passing under his inspection, and asked her to
+read it.
+
+She took the letter, wondering a little that it should be in Captain
+Con's handwriting.
+
+'I am to read it through?' she said, after a run over some lines.
+
+He nodded.  She thought it a sign of his friendliness in sharing family
+secrets with her, and read:
+
+'MY DEAR PHILIP,--Not a word of these contents, which will be delivered
+seasonably to the lady chiefly concerned, by the proper person.  She
+hears this morning I 'm off on a hasty visit to Ireland, as I have been
+preparing her of late to expect I must, and yours the blame, if any,
+though I will be the last to fling it at you.  I meet Father B.  and
+pretty Kitty before I cross.  Judging by the wind this morning, the
+passage will furnish good schooling for a spell of the hustings.  But if
+I am in the nature of things unable to command the waves, trust me for
+holding a mob in leash; and they are tolerably alike.  My spirits are up.
+Now the die is cast.  My election to the vacancy must be reckoned
+beforehand.  I promise you a sounding report from the Kincora Herald.
+They will not say of me after that (and read only the speeches reported
+in the local paper) "what is the man but an Irish adventurer!"  He is a
+lover of his country, Philip O'Donnell, and one of millions, we will
+hope.  And that stigmatic title of long standing, more than anything
+earthly, drove him to the step-to the ruin of his domestic felicity
+perhaps.  But we are past sighing.
+
+'Think you, when he crossed the tide, Caius Julius Caesar sighed?
+
+'No, nor thought of his life, nor his wife, but of the thing to be done.
+Laugh, my boy!  I know what I am about when I set my mind on a powerful
+example.  As the chameleon gets his colour, we get our character from the
+objects we contemplate .  .  .'
+
+Jane glanced over the edge of the letter sheet rosily at Philip.
+
+His dryness in hitting the laughable point diverted her, and her mind
+became suffused with a series of pictures of the chameleon captain
+planted in view of the Roman to become a copy of him, so that she did not
+peruse the terminating lines with her wakefullest attention:
+
+'The liege lady of my heart will be the earliest to hail her hero
+triumphant, or cherish him beaten--which is not in the prospect.  Let
+Ireland be true to Ireland.  We will talk of the consolidation of the
+Union by and by.  You are for that, you say, when certain things are
+done; and you are where I leave you, on the highway, though seeming to go
+at a funeral pace to certain ceremonies leading to the union of the two
+countries in the solidest fashion, to their mutual benefit, after a
+shining example.  Con sleeps with a corner of the eye open, and you are
+not the only soldier who is a strategist, and a tactician too, aware of
+when it is best to be out of the way.  Now adieu and pax vobiscum.  Reap
+the rich harvest of your fall to earth.  I leave you in the charge of the
+kindest of nurses, next to the wife of my bosom the best of women.
+Appreciate her, sir, or perish in my esteem.  She is one whom not to
+love is to be guilty of an offence deserving capital punishment, and a
+bastinado to season the culprit for his execution.  Have I not often
+informed her myself that a flower from her hand means more than treasures
+from the hands of others.  Expect me absent for a week.  The harangues
+will not be closely reported.  I stand by the truth, which is my love of
+the land of my birth.  A wife must come second to that if she would be
+first in her husband's consideration.  Hurrah me on, Philip, now it is
+action, and let me fancy I hear you shouting it.'
+
+The drop of the letter to the signature fluttered affectionately on a
+number of cordial adjectives, like the airy bird to his home in the corn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+MARS CONVALESCENT
+
+Jane's face was clear as the sky when she handed the letter back to
+Philip.  In doing so, it struck her that the prolonged directness of his
+look was peculiar: she attributed it to some effect of the fresh Spring
+atmosphere on a weakened frame.  She was guessing at his reasons for
+showing her the letter, and they appeared possibly serious.
+
+'An election to Parliament!  Perhaps Mrs. Adister should have a hint of
+it, to soften the shock I fear it may be: but we must wait till her
+headache has passed,' she said.
+
+'You read to the end?' said Philip.
+
+'Yes, Captain Con always amuses me, and I am bound to confess I have no
+positive disrelish of his compliments.  But this may prove a desperate
+step.  The secret of his happiness is in extreme jeopardy.  Nothing would
+stop him, I suppose?'
+
+Philip signified that it was too late.  He was moreover of opinion, and
+stated it in his briefest, that it would be advisable to leave the
+unfolding of the present secret to the captain.
+
+Jane wondered why the letter had been shown.  Her patient might be
+annoyed and needing sympathy?
+
+'After all,' she said, 'Captain Con may turn out to be a very good sort
+of member of Parliament in his way.'
+
+Philip's eyebrows lifted, and he let fall a breath, eloquent of his
+thoughts.
+
+'My brother says he is a serviceable director of the Company they are
+associated in.'
+
+'He finds himself among reasonable men, and he is a chameleon.'
+
+'Parliament may steady him.'
+
+'It is too much of a platform for Con's head.'
+
+'Yes, there is more of poet than politician,' said she.  'That is a
+danger.  But he calls himself our friend; I think he really has a liking
+for John and me.'
+
+'For you he has a real love,' said Philip.
+
+'Well, then, he may listen to us at times; he may be trusted not to wound
+us.  I am unmitigatedly for the one country--no divisions.  We want all
+our strength in these days of monstrous armies directed by banditti
+Councils.  England is the nation of the Christian example to nations.
+Oh!  surely it is her aim.  At least she strives to be that.  I think it,
+and I see the many faults we have.'
+
+Her patient's eyelids were down.
+
+She proposed to send her name up to Mrs. Adister.
+
+On her return from the poor lady racked with headache and lying little
+conscious of her husband's powder-barrel under the bed, Jane found her
+patient being worried by his official nurse, a farm-labourer's wife, a
+bundle of a woman, whose lumbering assiduities he fenced with reiterated
+humourous negatives to every one of her propositions, until she prefaced
+the last two or three of the list with a 'Deary me!' addressed
+consolatorily to herself.  She went through the same forms each day,
+at the usual hours of the day, and Jane, though she would have felt the
+apathetic doltishness of the woman less, felt how hard it must be for him
+to bear.
+
+'Your sister will be with you soon,' she said.  'I am glad, and yet I
+hope you will not allow her to put me aside altogether?'
+
+'You shall do as you wish,' said Philip.
+
+'Is she like Patrick?  Her name is Kathleen, I know.'
+
+'She is a raw Irish girl, of good Irish training, but Irish.'
+
+'I hope she will be pleased with England.  Like Patrick in face, I mean.'
+
+'We think her a good-looking girl.'
+
+'Does she play?  sing?'
+
+'Some of our ballads.'
+
+'She will delight my brother.  John loves Irish ballads.'
+
+A silence of long duration fell between them.  She fancied he would like
+to sleep, and gently rose to slip away, that she might consult with Mrs.
+Lappett about putting up some tentcover.  He asked her if she was going.
+'Not home,' she said.  His hand moved, but stopped.  It seemed to have
+meant to detain her.  She looked at a white fleece that came across the
+sun, desiring to conjure it to stay and shadow him.  It sailed by.  She
+raised her parasol.
+
+His eyelids were shut, and she thought him asleep.  Meditating on her
+unanswered question of Miss Kathleen's likeness to Patrick, Jane imagined
+a possibly greater likeness to her patient, and that he did not speak of
+his family's exclamations on the subject because of Kathleen's being so
+good-looking a girl.  For if good-looking, a sister must resemble these
+handsome features here, quiescent to inspection in their marble outlines
+as a corse.  So might he lie on the battle-field, with no one to watch
+over him!
+
+While she watched, sitting close beside him to shield his head from the
+sunbeams, her heart began to throb before she well knew the secret of it.
+She had sight of a tear that grew big under the lashes of each of his
+eyelids, and rolled heavily.  Her own eyes overflowed.
+
+The fit of weeping was momentary, April's, a novelty with her.  She
+accused her silly visions of having softened her.  A hasty smoothing to
+right and left removed the traces; they were unseen; and when she
+ventured to look at him again there was no sign of fresh drops falling.
+His eyelids kept shut.
+
+The arrival of her diurnal basket of provisions offered a refreshing
+intervention of the commonplace.  Bright air had sharpened his appetite:
+he said he had been sure it would, and anticipated cheating the doctor of
+a part of the sentence which condemned him to lie on his back up to the
+middle of June, a log.  Jane was hungry too, and they feasted together
+gaily, talking of Kathleen on her journey, her strange impressions and
+her way of proclaiming them, and of Patrick and where he might be now;
+ultimately of Captain Con and Mrs. Adister.
+
+'He has broken faith with her,' Philip said sternly.  'She will have the
+right to tell him so.  He never can be anything but a comic politician.
+Still he was bound to consult his wife previous to stepping before the
+public.  He knows that he married a fortune.'
+
+'A good fortune,' said Jane.
+
+Philip acquiesced.  'She is an excellent woman, a model of uprightness;
+she has done him all the good in the world, and here is he deceiving her,
+lying--there is no other word: and one lie leads to another.  When he
+married a fortune he was a successful adventurer.  The compact was
+understood.  His duty as a man of honour is to be true to his bond and
+serve the lady.  Falseness to his position won't wash him clean of the
+title.'
+
+Jane pleaded for Captain Con.  'He is chivalrously attentive to her.'
+
+'You have read his letter,' Philip replied.
+
+He crushed her charitable apologies with references to the letter.
+
+'We are not certain that Mrs. Adister will object,' said she.
+
+'Do you see her reading a speech of her husband's?' he remarked.
+Presently with something like a moan:
+
+'And I am her guest!'
+
+'Oh!  pray, do not think Mrs. Adister will ever allow you to feel the
+lightest shadow .  .  .' said Jane.
+
+'No; that makes it worse.'
+
+Had this been the burden of his thoughts when those two solitary tears
+forced their passage?
+
+Hardly: not even in his physical weakness would he consent to weep for
+such a cause.
+
+'I forgot to mention that Mrs. Adister has a letter from her husband
+telling her he has been called over to Ireland on urgent business,' she
+said.
+
+Philip answered: 'He is punctilious.'
+
+'I wish indeed he had been more candid,' Jane assented to the sarcasm.
+
+'In Ireland he is agreeably surprised by the flattering proposal of a
+vacant seat, and not having an instant to debate on it, assumes the
+consent of the heavenliest wife in Christendom.'
+
+Philip delivered the speech with a partial imitation of Captain Con
+addressing his wife on his return as the elected among the pure Irish
+party.  The effort wearied him.
+
+She supposed he was regretting his cousin's public prominence in the
+ranks of the malcontents.  'He will listen to you,' she said, while she
+smiled at his unwonted display of mimicry.
+
+'A bad mentor for him.  Antics are harmless, though they get us laughed
+at,' said Philip.
+
+'You may restrain him from excesses.'
+
+'Were I in that position, you would consider me guilty of greater than
+any poor Con is likely to commit.'
+
+'Surely you are not for disunion?'
+
+'The reverse.  I am for union on juster terms, that will hold it fast.'
+
+'But what are the terms?'
+
+He must have desired to paint himself as black to her as possible.  He
+stated the terms, which were hardly less than the affrighting ones blown
+across the Irish sea by that fierce party.  He held them to be just,
+simply sensible terms.  True, he spoke of the granting them as a sure
+method to rally all Ireland to an ardent love of the British flag.  But
+he praised names of Irish leaders whom she had heard Mr. Rockney denounce
+for disloyal insolence: he could find excuses for them and their dupes--
+poor creatures, verily!  And his utterances had a shocking emphasis.
+Then she was not wrong in her idea of the conspirator's head, her first
+impression of him!
+
+She could not quit the theme: doing that would have been to be
+indifferent: something urged her to it.
+
+'Are they really your opinions?'
+
+He seemed relieved by declaring that they were.
+
+'Patrick is quite free of them,' said she.
+
+'We will hope that the Irish fever will spare Patrick.  He was at a
+Jesuit college in France when he was wax.  Now he's taking the world.'
+
+'With so little of the Jesuit in him!'
+
+'Little of the worst: a good deal of the best.'
+
+'What is the best?'
+
+'Their training to study.  They train you to concentrate the brain upon
+the object of study.  And they train you to accept service: they fit you
+for absolute service: they shape you for your duties in the world; and so
+long as they don't smelt a man's private conscience, they are model
+masters.  Happily Patrick has held his own.  Not the Jesuits would have
+a chance of keeping a grasp on Patrick!  He'll always be a natural boy
+and a thoughtful man.'
+
+Jane's features implied a gentle shudder.
+
+'I shake a scarlet cloak to you?' said Philip.
+
+She was directed by his words to think of the scarlet coat.  'I reflect a
+little on the substance of things as well,' she said.  'Would not
+Patrick's counsels have an influence?'
+
+'Hitherto our Patrick has never presumed to counsel his elder brother.'
+
+'But an officer wearing .  .  .'
+
+'The uniform!  That would have to be stripped off.  There'd be an end to
+any professional career.'
+
+'You would not regret it?'
+
+'No sorrow is like a soldier's bidding farewell to flag and comrades.
+Happily politics and I have no business together.  If the country favours
+me with active service I'm satisfied for myself.  You asked me for my
+opinions: I was bound to give them.  Generally I let them rest.'
+
+Could she have had the temerity?  Jane marvelled at herself.
+
+She doubted that the weighty pair of tears had dropped for the country.
+Captain Con would have shed them over Erin, and many of them.  Captain
+Philip's tone was too plain and positive: he would be a most practical
+unhistrionic rebel.
+
+'You would countenance a revolt?' she said, striking at that extreme to
+elicit the favourable answer her tones angled for.  And it was instantly:
+
+'Not in arms.' He tried an explanation by likening the dissension to a
+wrangle in a civilised family over an unjust division of property.
+
+And here, as he was marking the case with some nicety and difficulty,
+an itinerant barrel-organ crashed its tragic tale of music put to torture
+at the gate.  It yelled of London to Jane, throttled the spirits of the
+woods, threw a smoke over the country sky, befouled the pure air she
+loved.
+
+The instrument was one of the number which are packed to suit all English
+tastes and may be taken for a rough sample of the jumble of them, where a
+danceless quadrille-tune succeeds a suicidal Operatic melody and is
+followed by the weariful hymn, whose last drawl pert polka kicks aside.
+Thus does the poor Savoyard compel a rich people to pay for their wealth.
+Not without pathos in the abstract perhaps do the wretched machines
+pursue their revolutions of their factory life, as incapable of
+conceiving as of bestowing pleasure: a bald cry for pennies through the
+barest pretence to be agreeable but Jane found it hard to be tolerant of
+them out of London, and this one affecting her invalid and Mrs. Adister
+must be dismissed.  Wayland was growling; he had to be held by the
+collar.  He spied an objectionable animal.  A jerky monkey was attached
+to the organ; and his coat was red, his kepi was blue; his tailor had
+rigged him as a military gentleman.  Jane called to the farm-wife.
+Philip assured her he was not annoyed.  Jane observed him listening,
+and by degrees she distinguished a maundering of the Italian song she
+had one day sung to Patrick in his brother's presence.
+
+'I remember your singing that the week before I went to India,' said
+Philip, and her scarlet blush flooded her face.
+
+'Can you endure the noise?' she asked him.
+
+'Con would say it shrieks "murder."  But I used to like it once.'
+
+Mrs. Lappett came answering to the call.  Her children were seen up the
+garden setting to one another with squared aprons, responsive to a
+livelier measure.
+
+'Bless me, miss, we think it so cheerful!' cried Mrs. Lappett, and
+glanced at her young ones harmonious and out of mischief.
+
+'Very well,' said Jane, always considerate for children.  She had
+forgotten the racked Mrs. Adister.
+
+Now the hymn of Puritanical gloom-the peacemaker with Providence
+performing devotional exercises in black bile.  The leaps of the children
+were dashed.  A sallow two or three minutes composed their motions, and
+then they jumped again to the step for lively legs.  The similarity to
+the regimental band heading soldiers on the march from Church might have
+struck Philip.
+
+'I wonder when I shall see Patrick!' he said, quickened in spite of
+himself by the sham sounds of music to desire changes and surprises.
+
+Jane was wondering whether he could be a man still to brood tearfully
+over his old love.
+
+She echoed him.  'And I!  Soon, I hope.'
+
+The appearance of Mrs. Adister with features which were the acutest
+critical summary of the discord caused toll to be paid instantly, and
+they beheld a flashing of white teeth and heard Italian accents.  The
+monkey saluted militarily, but with painful suggestions of his foregone
+drilling in the ceremony.
+
+'We are safe nowhere from these intrusions,' Mrs. Adister said; 'not on
+these hills!--and it must be a trial for the wretched men to climb them,
+that thing on their backs.'
+
+'They are as accustomed to it as mountain smugglers bearing packs of
+contraband,' said Philip.
+
+'Con would have argued him out of hearing before he ground a second
+note,' she resumed.  'I have no idea when Con returns from his unexpected
+visit to Ireland.'
+
+'Within a fortnight, madam.'
+
+'Let me believe it!  You have heard from him?  But you are in the air!
+exposed!  My head makes me stupid.  It is now five o'clock.  The air
+begins to chill.  Con will never forgive me if you catch a cold, and I
+would not incur his blame.'
+
+The eyes of Jane and Philip shot an exchange.
+
+'Anything you command, madam,' said Philip.
+
+He looked up and breathed his heaven of fresh air.  Jane pitied, she
+could not interpose to thwart his act of resignation.  The farmer, home
+for tea, and a footman, took him between them, crutched, while Mrs.
+Adister said to Jane: 'The doctor's orders are positive:--if he is to be
+a man once more, he must rest his back and not use his legs for months.
+He was near to being a permanent cripple from that fall.  My brother
+Edward had one like it in his youth.  Soldiers are desperate creatures.'
+
+'I think Mr. Adister had his fall when hunting, was it not?' said Jane.
+
+'Hunting, my dear.'
+
+That was rather different from a fall on duty before the enemy, incurred
+by severe exhaustion after sunstroke!  .  .  .
+
+Jane took her leave of Philip beside his couch of imprisonment in his
+room, promising to return in the early morning.  He embraced her old dog
+Wayland tenderly.  Hard men have sometimes a warm affection for dogs.
+
+Walking homeward she likewise gave Wayland a hug.  She called him 'dear
+old fellow,' and questioned him of his fondness for her, warning him not
+to be faithless ever to the mistress who loved him.  Was not her old
+Wayland as good a protector as the footman Mrs. Adister pressed her to
+have at her heels?  That he was!
+
+Captain Con's behaviour grieved her.  And it certainly revived an ancient
+accusation against his countrymen.  If he cared for her so much, why had
+he not placed confidence in her and commissioned her to speak of his
+election to his wife?  Irishmen will never be quite sincere!--But why had
+his cousin exposed him to one whom he greatly esteemed?  However angry he
+might be with Con O'Donnell in his disapproval of the captain's conduct,
+it was not very considerate to show the poor man to her in his natural
+colours.  Those words: 'The consolidation of the Union:' sprang up.  She
+had a dim remembrance of words ensuing: 'ceremonies going at a funeral
+pace .  .  .  on the highway to the solidest kind of union:'--Yes, he
+wrote: 'I leave you to .  .  .' And Captain Philip showed her the letter:
+
+She perceived motives beginning to stir.  He must have had his intention:
+and now as to his character!--Jane was of the order of young women
+possessing active minds instead of figured paste-board fronts, who see
+what there is to be seen about them and know what may be known instead of
+decorously waiting for the astonishment of revelations.  As soon as she
+had asked herself the nature of the design of so honourable a man as
+Captain Philip in showing her his cousin's letter, her blood spun round
+and round, waving the reply as a torch; and the question of his character
+confirmed it.
+
+But could he be imagined seeking to put her on her guard?  There may be
+modesty in men well aware of their personal attractions: they can credit
+individual women with powers of resistance.  He was not vain to the
+degree which stupefies the sense of there being weight or wisdom in
+others.  And he was honour's own.  By these lights of his character she
+read the act.  His intention was .  .  .  and even while she saw it
+accurately, the moment of keen perception was overclouded by her innate
+distrust of her claim to feminine charms.  For why should he wish her
+to understand that he was no fortune-hunter and treated heiresses with
+greater reserve than ordinary women!  How could it matter to him?
+
+She saw the tears roll.  Tears of men sink plummet-deep; they find their
+level.  The tears of such a man have more of blood than of water in
+them.--What was she doing when they fell?  She was shading his head from
+the sun.  What, then, if those tears came of the repressed desire to
+thank her with some little warmth?  He was honour's own, and warmhearted
+Patrick talked of him as a friend whose heart was, his friend's.
+Thrilling to kindness, and, poor soul! helpless to escape it, he felt.
+perhaps that he had never thanked her, and could not.  He lay there,
+weak and tongue-tied: hence those two bright volumes of his condition
+of weakness.
+
+So the pursuit of the mystery ended, as it had commenced, in confusion,
+but of a milder sort and partially transparent at one or two of the gates
+she had touched.  A mind capable of seeing was twisted by a nature that
+would not allow of open eyes; yet the laden emotions of her nature
+brought her round by another channel to the stage neighbouring sight,
+where facts, dimly recognised for such--as they may be in truth, are
+accepted under their disguises, because disguise of them is needed by
+the bashful spirit which accuses itself of audaciousness in presuming to
+speculate.  Had she asked herself the reason of her extended speculation,
+her foot would not have stopped more abruptly on the edge of a torrent
+than she on that strange road of vapours and flying lights.  She did not;
+she sang, she sent her voice through the woods and took the splendid ring
+of it for an assurance of her peculiarly unshackled state.  She loved
+this liberty.  Of the men who had 'done her the honour,' not one had
+moved her to regret the refusal.  She lived in the hope of simply doing
+good, and could only give her hand to a man able to direct and help her;
+one who would bear to be matched with her brother.  Who was he?  Not
+discoverable; not likely to be.
+
+Therefore she had her freedom, an absolutely unflushed freedom, happier
+than poor Grace Barrow's.  Rumour spoke of Emma Colesworth having a wing
+clipped.  How is it that sensible women can be so susceptible?  For,
+thought Jane, the moment a woman is what is called in love, she can give
+her heart no longer to the innocent things about her; she is cut away
+from Nature: that pure well-water is tasteless to her.  To me it is wine!
+
+The drinking of the pure well-water as wine is among the fatal signs of
+fire in the cup, showing Nature at work rather to enchain the victim than
+bid her daughter go.  Jane of course meant the poet's 'Nature.' She did
+not reflect that the strong glow of poetic imagination is wanted to
+hallow a passionate devotion to the inanimate for this evokes the
+spiritual; and passionateness of any kind in narrower brains should be
+a proclamation to us of sanguine freshets not coming from a spiritual
+source.  But the heart betraying deluded her.  She fancied she had not
+ever been so wedded to Nature as on that walk through the bursting
+beechwoods, that sweet lonely walk, perfect in loneliness, where even a
+thought of a presence was thrust away as a desecration and images of
+souls in thought were shadowy.
+
+Her lust of freedom gave her the towering holiday.  She took the delirium
+in her own pure fashion, in a love of the bankside flowers and the downy
+edges of the young beech-buds fresh on the sprays.  And it was no unreal
+love, though too intent and forcible to win the spirit from the object.
+She paid for this indulgence of her mood by losing the spirit entirely.
+At night she was a spent rocket.  What had gone she could not tell: her
+very soul she almost feared.  Her glorious walk through the wood seemed
+burnt out.  She struck a light to try her poet on the shelf of the elect
+of earth by her bed, and she read, and read flatness.  Not his the fault!
+She revered him too deeply to lay it on him.  Whose was it?  She had a
+vision of the gulfs of bondage.
+
+Could it be possible that human persons were subject to the spells of
+persons with tastes, aims, practices, pursuits alien to theirs?  It was a
+riddle taxing her to solve it for the resistance to a monstrous iniquity
+of injustice, degrading her conception of our humanity.  She attacked it
+in the abstract, as a volunteer champion of our offended race.  And Oh!
+it could not be.  The battle was won without a blow.
+
+Thereupon came glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-
+enfolded, foreign; they were chapters of soft romance, appearing
+interminable, an endless mystery, an insatiable thirst for the mystery.
+She heard crashes of the opera-melody, and despising it even more than
+the wretched engine of the harshness, she was led by it, tyrannically led
+a captive, like the organ-monkey, until perforce she usurped the note,
+sounded the cloying tune through her frame, passed into the vulgar
+sugariness, lost herself.
+
+And saying to herself: This is what moves them!  she was moved.  One
+thrill of appreciation drew her on the tide, and once drawn from shore
+she became submerged.  Why am I not beautiful, was her thought.  Those
+voluptuous modulations of melting airs are the natural clothing of
+beautiful women.  Beautiful women may believe themselves beloved.
+They are privileged to believe, they are born with the faith.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A whisper of cajolery in season is often the secret
+Ah!  we're in the enemy's country now
+Beautiful women may believe themselves beloved
+Could peruse platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm
+Foamy top is offered and gulped as equivalent to an idea
+Hard men have sometimes a warm affection for dogs
+He was not alive for his own pleasure
+Hug the hatred they packed up among their bundles
+I baint done yet
+Irishmen will never be quite sincere
+Loudness of the interrogation precluded thought of an answer
+Love the children of Erin, when not fretted by them
+Loves his poets, can almost understand what poetry means
+May lull themselves with their wakefulness
+Never forget that old Ireland is weeping
+Not every chapter can be sunshine
+Not likely to be far behind curates in besieging an heiress
+Not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be
+Nursing of a military invalid awakens tenderer anxieties
+Paying compliments and spoiling a game!
+Secret of the art was his meaning what he said
+Suggestion of possible danger might more dangerous than silence
+Tears of men sink plummet-deep
+Tears of such a man have more of blood than of water in them
+They laugh, but they laugh extinguishingly
+Time, whose trick is to turn corners of unanticipated sharpness
+Twisted by a nature that would not allow of open eyes
+With death; we'd rather not, because of a qualm
+Woman's precious word No at the sentinel's post, and alert
+Would like to feel he was doing a bit of good
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+*************************************************************************
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of The Celt and Saxon, v2
+by George Meredith
+
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