Celt and Saxon — Complete - George Meredith

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nodded assent. 'But my purse is Philip's, and my house, and my horses.'

      'Not bequeathed by a member of your family?'

      'By a distant cousin, chancing to have been one of my godmothers.'

      'Women do these things,' Mr. Adister said, not in perfect approbation of their doings.

      'And I think too, it might have gone to the elder,' Patrick replied to his tone.

      'It is not your intention to be an idle gentleman?'

      'No, nor a vagrant Irishman, sir.'

      'You propose to sit down over there?'

      'When I've more brains to be of service to them and the land, I do.'

      Mr. Adister pulled the arm of his chair. 'The professions are crammed. An Irish gentleman owning land might do worse. I am in favour of some degree of military training for all gentlemen. You hunt?'

      Patrick's look was, 'Give me a chance'; and Mr. Adister continued: 'Good runs are to be had here; you shall try them. You are something of a shot, I suppose. We hear of gentlemen now who neither hunt nor shoot. You fence?'

      'That's to say, I've had lessons in the art.'

      'I am not aware that there is now an art of fencing taught in Ireland.'

      'Nor am I,' said Patrick; 'though there's no knowing what goes on in the cabins.'

      Mr. Adister appeared to acquiesce. Observations of sly import went by him like the whispering wind.

      'Your priests should know,' he said.

      To this Patrick thought it well not to reply. After a pause between them, he referred to the fencing.

      'I was taught by a Parisian master of the art, sir.'

      'You have been to Paris?'

      'I was educated in Paris.'

      'How? Ah!' Mr. Adister corrected himself in the higher notes of recollection. 'I think I have heard something of a Jesuit seminary.'

      'The Fathers did me the service to knock all I know into me, and call it education, by courtesy,' said Patrick, basking in the unobscured frown of his host.

      'Then you are accustomed to speak French?' The interrogation was put to extract some balm from the circumstance.

      Patrick tried his art of fence with the absurdity by saying: 'All but like a native.'

      'These Jesuits taught you the use of the foils?'

      'They allowed me the privilege of learning, sir.'

      After meditation, Mr. Adister said: 'You don't dance?' He said it speculating on the' kind of gentleman produced in Paris by the disciples of Loyola.

      'Pardon me, sir, you hit on another of my accomplishments.'

      'These Jesuits encourage dancing?'

      'The square dance—short of the embracing: the valse is under interdict.'

      Mr. Adister peered into his brows profoundly for a glimpse of the devilry in that exclusion of the valse.

      What object had those people in encouraging the young fellow to be a perfect fencer and dancer, so that he should be of the school of the polite world, and yet subservient to them?

      'Thanks to the Jesuits, then, you are almost a Parisian,' he remarked; provoking the retort:

      'Thanks to them, I've stored a little, and Paris is to me as pure a place as four whitewashed walls:' Patrick added: 'without a shadow of a monk on them.' Perhaps it was thrown in for the comfort of mundane ears afflicted sorely, and no point of principle pertained to the slur on a monk.

      Mr. Adister could have exclaimed, That shadow of the monk! had he been in an exclamatory mood. He said: 'They have not made a monk of you, then.'

      Patrick was minded to explain how that the Jesuits are a religious order exercising worldly weapons. The lack of precise words admonished him of the virtue of silence, and he retreated—with a quiet negative: 'They have not.'

      'Then, you are no Jesuit?' he was asked.

      Thinking it scarcely required a response, he shrugged.

      'You would not change your religion, sir?' said Mr. Adister in seeming anger.

      Patrick thought he would have to rise: he half fancied himself summoned to change his religion or depart from the house.

      'Not I,' said he.

      'Not for the title of Prince?' he was further pressed, and he replied:

      'I don't happen to have an ambition for the title of Prince.'

      'Or any title!' interjected Mr. Adister, 'or whatever the devil can offer!—or,' he spoke more pointedly, 'for what fools call a brilliant marriage?'

      'My religion?' Patrick now treated the question seriously and raised his head: 'I'd not suffer myself to be asked twice.'

      The sceptical northern-blue eyes of his host dwelt on him with their full repellent stare.

      The young Catholic gentleman expected he might hear a frenetic zealot roar out: Be off!

      He was not immediately reassured by the words 'Dead or alive, then, you have a father!'

      The spectacle of a state of excitement without a show of feeling was novel to Patrick. He began to see that he was not implicated in a wrath that referred to some great offender, and Mr. Adister soon confirmed his view by saying: 'You are no disgrace to your begetting, sir!'

      With that he quitted his chair, and hospitably proposed to conduct his guest over the house and grounds.

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      Men of the Adister family having taken to themselves brides of a very dusty pedigree from the Principality, there were curious rough heirlooms to be seen about the house, shields on the armoury walls and hunting-horns, and drinking-horns, and spears, and chain-belts bearing clasps of heads of beasts; old gold ornaments, torques, blue-stone necklaces, under glass-cases, were in the library; huge rings that must have given the wearers fearful fists; a shirt of coarse linen with a pale brown spot on the breast, like a fallen beech-leaf; and many sealed parchment-skins, very precious, for an inspection of which, as Patrick was bidden to understand, History humbly knocked at the Earlsfont hall-doors; and the proud muse made her transcripts of them kneeling. He would have been affected by these wonders had any relic of Adiante appeased his thirst. Or had there been one mention of her, it would have disengaged him from the incessant speculations regarding the daughter of the house, of whom not a word was uttered. No portrait of her was shown. Why was she absent from her home so long? where was she? How could her name be started? And was it she who was the sinner in her father's mind? But the idolatrous love between Adiante and her father was once a legend: they could not have been cut asunder. She had offered up her love of Philip as a sacrifice to it: Patrick recollected that, and now with a softer gloom on his brooding he released her from the burden of his grand charge of unfaithfulness to the truest of lovers, by acknowledging that he was in the presence of the sole rival of his brother. Glorious girl that she was, her betrayal of Philip had nothing of a woman's base caprice to make it infamous: she had sacrificed him to her reading of duty; and that was duty to her father; and the point of duty was in this instance rather a sacred one. He heard voices murmur that she might be praised. He remonstrated with them, assuring them, as one who knew, that a woman's first duty is her duty to her lover; her parents are her second thought. Her lover, in the consideration of a real soul among the shifty creatures, is her husband; and have we not the word of heaven directing her to submit herself to him who is her husband before all others? That peerless Adiante had previously

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