Lord Alistair's Rebellion

by Allen Upward

The servants fell back with faces of demure congratulation as he passed between them to the foot of the staircase. It was evident that they viewed this home-coming of the prodigal as the pleasant and appropriate ending to a deeply interesting history. Perhaps Lord Alistair’s transgressions had aroused in their breasts a secret fellow-feeling such as they could never have for their upright, decorous master. The conduct which had disgraced Lord Alistair in the eyes of his equals had made him a hero in theirs. Disgrace, after all, is a relative term; what is ignominy in the schoolroom is often glory in the playground.

Alistair reached the first floor, and took his way to the well-remembered little drawing-room, where his mother always sat when she was alone. Tapping softly on the panel, he opened the door and went in.

It was an old-fashioned room with narrow Georgian windows, and the walls were decorated with painted panels, set in elaborate gilt scrollwork, with small tail-pieces underneath, in the style of an Italian altar-piece. A picture of sportsmen in a coppice was completed by a dead pheasant below, and a sea-piece was similarly finished off with a group of shells. In contrast with this eighteenth-century elegance the furniture was of that ungraceful, stereotyped pattern which has not yet been out of date long enough to be esteemed for its curiosity. It was the work of an age which valued the useful above the beautiful, and preferred the accurate production of machinery to the irregular handiwork of the craftsman. It was the age of the political economists, when Free Trade was the gospel of humanity, and the world’s ideal took shape in a huge bazaar. It was an age in which England ruled the world, and the shopkeeper ruled England, and men deemed that the millennium could not be far away.

The religion of this age was Evangelical Christianity. The work of Wellesley and Whitefield still leavened the national life from the cottage to the throne. The Catholic conspiracy had not become formidable; the rising tide of knowledge had not yet sapped the foundations of the old beliefs. A miscellany of Hebrew literature, half savage, half sublime, bound up with the cryptic legends of the Roman catacombs, and rendered into English by the intellect of the sixteenth century, was accepted as the personal composition of the Creator, inspired, infallible, and irrevocable, from the first letter in the word Genesis to the last in the word Amen. Salvation by faith was the watchword of the Churches; the unbeliever was assured that his best actions were but additional sins until he had gone through that spiritual experience which brought him within the pale of the redeemed.

Yet this strait, remorseless creed educated women who were gracious and beautiful in their lives, and of such women Caroline, Duchess of Trent, was one. She accepted her creed, as the scientist accepts the law of cause and effect, without understanding it, but her logic was able to reconcile it with hope and charity, and with a tireless devotion to the good of all about her.

They who are willing to sacrifice themselves will never want those who are willing to accept the sacrifice. In her girlhood Caroline had been a maid of honour in the Court of Queen Victoria, and she had ever since been one of that small circle whom the widowed monarch counted as her personal friends. The needs of selfish parents had forced her into an early marriage with a sickly old man whom she nursed faithfully and kindly, but whom she could not love. He died before she was thirty, leaving her with enough wealth to attract Lord Alexander Stuart, the penniless younger son of a great but impoverished house.

To this man, as handsome as he was worthless, she gave her heart and her fortune, in accordance with the common law which mates the best with the worst, and he had become the father of her children before she made the discovery that he was an irreclaimable drunkard and gambler. For their own sakes she consented to part with her children, and she passed the next ten years of her life in accompanying the man to whom she believed herself bound, from Continental hotel to hotel, keeping up a hopeless struggle against the vices which were dragging him down to the grave.

Her loyalty, and perhaps some relic of her love, survived him, and no word of hers had ever betrayed his memory to his sons. In the face of the younger she found a resemblance to his father which had insensibly gained on her affection, and although she had tried to disguise it from them, and from herself, both the boys soon knew that Alistair was their mother’s favourite. When the courtesy rank of Duchess was conferred on her by royal patent, she did not value the distinction for herself, but her mother’s heart felt a secret pride that her handsome, naughty Alistair should be given the style of Lord.

The catastrophe which opened her eyes to the meaning of heredity rendered her frantic with grief and shame. That likeness between Alistair and his father which had fascinated her for so long now became a source of terror. The handsome boyish face, with its ruddy cheeks and bright eyes and clustering curls, which had gladdened her sight, was now a dreadful chart in which she read prophecies of evil to come.

Under the stress of panic she took that step which she had since bitterly regretted, which had cost Alistair his religion, and had cost her his confidence. Ever since that miserable time mother and son had remained apart, gazing at each other wistfully across a chasm which neither could bridge.