The Victorian world had been satirized unconsciously by the Victorian poet. In his “Idylls of the King” Tennyson had depicted a man without passions trying to impose his own cold virtues on men of warmer temperament, and producing first hypocrisy and deceit, and in the end a deeper corruption. The Victorian world had been like Arthur’s Court.
In this world Cant became a religion, and hypocrisy was enforced by law. It was a world whose literature and art were adjusted to the mental and moral level of the Sunday-school. It was a world in which a terrible disease, bred of moral corruption, scourged the race, and every effort to stay its ravages was fought against tooth and nail by the mænads of social purity. It was a world in which selfishness was inculcated in a million sermons, and slander and persecution were reckoned as good works. It was a world in which blackmailing became a recognized profession. It was a world in which men sent sailors to be drowned in rotten ships, and built chapels with the proceeds. It was a world which overthrew kings and set up millionaire monopolists; which suppressed slavery and invented sweating; which substituted the prostitute for the concubine; which imposed a curfew on beer at home and sold opium abroad at the point of the bayonet. A great pirate Empire ravaged the seas, with a crucifix at the masthead, and stole pagan continents.
One night when Alistair Stuart went round to the house in Chestnut-Tree Walk he found its master waiting for him in a state of excited expectation.
“Have you heard the news?” Des Louvres asked in a whisper, as soon as Stuart had sat down. “They are trying to keep it out of the papers as long as possible, but it has reached me from a source that I can absolutely depend upon. Queen Victoria is dying.”
CHAPTER XXII
HIGH TREASON
“I have my information from a person in the confidence of one of the Royal Family. The Queen cannot last more than three days.”
Stuart had received the news with a slight shock. For him, as for all his generation, the venerable figure seated on the throne had almost a legendary character. It seemed impossible to think of the British Empire without Queen Victoria; the idea of a new head on the coins and postage-stamps was strange and incredible.
But, apart from these reflections the Frenchman’s announcement did not strike him as having any importance for himself, and he was unable to understand the excitement with which Des Louvres took him by the arm and drew him towards the door of the room.
“Most of the others are here,” Des Louvres said in a voice lowered to a whisper. “I telegraphed to them as soon as I heard. They are in there, waiting for you to take the chair.”
Then for the first time it struck Alistair that the approaching demise of the Crown was an event likely to prove a crisis, and that Des Louvres expected him to play a part in keeping with his ancestral traditions and outlawed state.