Alistair went home feeling as though he had been in possession for a brief moment of the magic bell of northern folklore, which enables its wearer to descend into the bowels of the earth and see the gnomes at their work. He had a vision in which he seemed to have been walking below the surface of the great city among the foundations of palaces. On either hand the tremendous walls rose up, immovable, forbidding, and dank with the underground slime. These were the mighty bases of the powers of wealth, against which he had set his feeble shoulder in the foolish expectation that he could make them rock. And the puny effort had left him beating out his life down there in the subterranean mire at the foot of those sunless piles among the forgotten pauper rubbish of the world.
CHAPTER XIII
ROYAL PATRONAGE
On his arrival at the house, weighed down by this new and dreary sense of discomfiture, Alistair found Molly in a state of pleased excitement.
“There’s a letter for you from Easterthorpe. It’s from the Duke of Gloucester!” was her greeting.
Alistair flushed as he recognized Prince Herbert’s handwriting. He had not forgotten the bazaar, and he tore open the envelope with some fear of encountering a reproach.
The Duke addressed him as “Dear Alistair,” just as in their boyish days, and begged him to come down to Gloucester Lodge for the week-end.
“There will be no one here but my wife and children,” the royal note ended, “and we can talk about old times.”
Left to himself, Alistair would have declined the invitation, in spite of the courtly theory that invitations from such a quarter are in the nature of commands. He was too much disgusted with the way in which life had dealt with him, and he with life, to have any more heart in the struggle. It would be simpler to go under, to efface himself, and cease to keep before the world.
But he found that Molly was determined that he should go. She had made up her mind that the Prince’s invitation was a repudiation of the Duke of Trent, and an intimation that Stuart’s irregular connection with herself had not lowered him in the royal estimation.
Alistair, of course, knew better. He saw perfectly well that Prince Herbert’s reference to his family was a delicate way of saying that the visit must be a private one. The Court Circular would not know of Lord Alistair’s presence at Gloucester Lodge.