The Patrician | Page 8

CHAPTER III

In a very high, white-pannelled room, with but little furniture, Lord
Valleys greeted his mother-in-law respectfully.
"Motored up in nine hours, Ma'am--not bad going."
"I am glad you came. When is Miltoun's election?"
"On the twenty-ninth."
"Pity! He should be away from Monkland, with that--anonymous
woman living there."
"Ah! yes; you've heard of her!"
Lady Casterley replied sharply:
"You're too easy-going, Geoffrey."
Lord Valleys smiled.
"These war scares," he said, "are getting a bore. Can't quite make out
what the feeling of the country is about them."
Lady Casterley rose:
"It has none. When war comes, the feeling will be all right. It always is.
Give me your arm. Are you hungry?"...
When Lord Valleys spoke of war, he spoke as one who, since he
arrived at years of discretion, had lived within the circle of those who
direct the destinies of States. It was for him--as for the lilies in the great
glass house--impossible to see with the eyes, or feel with the feelings of
a flower of the garden outside. Soaked in the best prejudices and
manners of his class, he lived a life no more shut off from the general
than was to be expected. Indeed, in some sort, as a man of facts and
common sense, he was fairly in touch with the opinion of the average
citizen. He was quite genuine when he said that he believed he knew
what the people wanted better than those who prated on the subject;
and no doubt he was right, for temperamentally he was nearer to them

than their own leaders, though he would not perhaps have liked to be
told so. His man-of-the-world, political shrewdness had been
superimposed by life on a nature whose prime strength was its
practicality and lack of imagination. It was his business to be efficient,
but not strenuous, or desirous of pushing ideas to their logical
conclusions; to be neither narrow nor puritanical, so long as the shell of
'good form' was preserved intact; to be a liberal landlord up to the point
of not seriously damaging his interests; to be well-disposed towards the
arts until those arts revealed that which he had not before perceived; it
was his business to have light hands, steady eyes, iron nerves, and
those excellent manners that have no mannerisms. It was his nature to
be easy-going as a husband; indulgent as a father; careful and
straightforward as a politician; and as a man, addicted to pleasure, to
work, and to fresh air. He admired, and was fond of his wife, and had
never regretted his marriage. He had never perhaps regretted anything,
unless it were that he had not yet won the Derby, or quite succeeded in
getting his special strain of blue-ticked pointers to breed absolutely true
to type. His mother-in-law he respected, as one might respect a
principle.
There was indeed in the personality of that little old lady the
tremendous force of accumulated decision--the inherited assurance of
one whose prestige had never been questioned; who, from long
immunity, and a certain clear-cut matter-of-factness, bred by the habit
of command, had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige
ever could be questioned. Her knowledge of her own mind was no
ordinary piece of learning, had not, in fact, been learned at all, but
sprang full-fledged from an active dominating temperament. Fortified
by the necessity, common to her class, of knowing thoroughly the more
patent side of public affairs; armoured by the tradition of a culture
demanded by leadership; inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas;
owning no master, but in servitude to her own custom of leading, she
had a mind, formidable as the two-edged swords wielded by her
ancestors the Fitz-Harolds, at Agincourt or Poitiers-- a mind which had
ever instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the
selves of others; produced by those foolish practices of introspection,
contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority. If Lord

Valleys was the body of the aristocratic machine, Lady Casterley was
the steel spring inside it. All her life studiously unaffected and simple
in attire; of plain and frugal habit; an early riser; working at something
or other from morning till night, and as little worn-out at seventy-eight
as most women of fifty, she had only one weak spot--and that was her
strength--blindness as to the nature and size of her place in the scheme
of things. She was a type, a force.
Wonderfully well she went with the room in which they were dining,
whose grey walls, surmounted by a deep frieze painted somewhat in the
style of Fragonard, contained many nymphs and roses now rather dim;
with the furniture, too, which had a look of having survived into times
not its own. On the tables were no flowers, save