The Patrician | Page 9

five lilies in an old
silver chalice; and on the wall over the great sideboard a portrait of the
late Lord Casterley.
She spoke:
"I hope Miltoun is taking his own line?"
"That's the trouble. He suffers from swollen principles--only wish he
could keep them out of his speeches."
"Let him be; and get him away from that woman as soon as his
election's over. What is her real name?"
"Mrs. something Lees Noel."
"How long has she been there?"
"About a year, I think."
"And you don't know anything about her?"
Lord Valleys raised his shoulders.
"Ah!" said Lady Casterley; "exactly! You're letting the thing drift. I
shall go down myself. I suppose Gertrude can have me? What has that
Mr. Courtier to do with this good lady?"

Lord Valleys smiled. In this smile was the whole of his polite and
easy-going philosophy. "I am no meddler," it seemed to say; and at
sight of that smile Lady Casterley tightened her lips.
"He is a firebrand," she said. "I read that book of his against War-
-most inflammatory. Aimed at Grant-and Rosenstern, chiefly. I've just
seen, one of the results, outside my own gates. A mob of anti- War
agitators."
Lord Valleys controlled a yawn.
"Really? I'd no idea Courtier had any influence."
"He is dangerous. Most idealists are negligible-his book was clever."
"I wish to goodness we could see the last of these scares, they only
make both countries look foolish," muttered Lord Valleys.
Lady Casterley raised her glass, full of a bloody red wine. "The war
would save us," she said.
"War is no joke."
"It would be the beginning of a better state of things."
"You think so?"
"We should get the lead again as a nation, and Democracy would be put
back fifty years."
Lord Valleys made three little heaps of salt, and paused to count them;
then, with a slight uplifting of his eyebrows, which seemed to doubt
what he was going to say, he murmured: "I should have said that we
were all democrats nowadays.... What is it, Clifton?"
"Your chauffeur would like to know, what time you will have the car?"
"Directly after dinner."

Twenty minutes later, he was turning through the scrolled iron gates
into the road for London. It was falling dark; and in the tremulous sky
clouds were piled up, and drifted here and there with a sort of endless
lack of purpose. No direction seemed to have been decreed unto their
wings. They had met together in the firmament like a flock of giant
magpies crossing and re-crossing each others' flight. The smell of rain
was in the air. The car raised no dust, but bored swiftly on, searching
out the road with its lamps. On Putney Bridge its march was stayed by
a string of waggons. Lord Valleys looked to right and left. The river
reflected the thousand lights of buildings piled along her sides, lamps
of the embankments, lanterns of moored barges. The sinuous pallid
body of this great Creature, for ever gliding down to the sea, roused in
his mind no symbolic image. He had had to do with her, years back, at
the Board of Trade, and knew her for what she was, extremely dirty,
and getting abominably thin just where he would have liked her plump.
Yet, as he lighted a cigar, there came to him a queer feeling--as if he
were in the presence of a woman he was fond of.
"I hope to God," he thought, "nothing'il come of these scares!" The car
glided on into the long road, swarming with traffic, towards the
fashionable heart of London. Outside stationers' shops, however, the
posters of evening papers were of no reassuring order.
'THE PLOT THICKENS.' 'MORE REVELATIONS.' 'GRAVE
SITUATION THREATENED.'
And before each poster could be seen a little eddy in the stream of the
passers-by--formed by persons glancing at the news, and disengaging
themselves, to press on again. The Earl of Valleys caught himself
wondering what they thought of it! What was passing behind those pale
rounds of flesh turned towards the posters?
Did they think at all, these men and women in the street? What was
their attitude towards this vaguely threatened cataclysm? Face after
face, stolid and apathetic, expressed nothing, no active desire, certainly
no enthusiasm, hardly any dread. Poor devils! The thing, after all, was
no more within their control than it was within the power of ants to stop
the ruination of their ant-heap by some passing boy! It was no doubt

quite true, that the people had never had much voice in the making of
war. And the words of a Radical weekly, which as an impartial man he
always forced himself to read, recurred to him. "Ignorant of the facts,
hypnotized by the words 'Country' and 'Patriotism';