“And, damn it! I’ll be a hooligan before I will sell the little woman for a few miserable thousands, like that! Go to the devil, you and your clean sheet! I’m sorry for the old mater, if she feels it, but I can’t stand your patronage, and I won’t have your moralizing; so you can just leave me alone.”
“I will leave you alone!” exclaimed his brother. “God forgive me, I sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve being cursed with such a brother as you!”
He turned and strode out of the room, leaving Alistair to sway and sink down with his head upon the table among the ashes and wine-stains of the extinguished revel.
CHAPTER VIII
A LEGITIMIST DEMONSTRATION
The carriage which brought the Duchess of Trent and Miss Vanbrugh to the Legitimist bazaar set them down at the door of a mean-looking, brick-built schoolroom, over the door of which was a niche containing the statue of a woman holding a babe in her arms.
This woman was intended for a Jewish peasant, wife of the carpenter Joseph of Nazareth. This babe was her Divine Son, the second person of the Christian Triad.
The woman wore an emblem of glory in the form of a crown on her head. The babe’s head was undecorated. The group was copied without alteration from the ancient pagan idols of the Great Mother and her Child, worshipped for countless ages in the Mediterranean zone.
Beneath the niche four letters were cut. They were the four initials, A.M.D.G., of the Latin words, Ad majorem Dei gloriam—“To the greater glory of God.”
It was the motto of the famous Society of Jesus, set up over a building in which the children of Protestant Churchmen were being educated. Only the Jesuit motto was not set out in full; it was merely hinted at by those cryptic letters. This was a touch that Ignatius Loyola would have admired.
Neither of the two ladies observed the unobtrusive initials, nor, if they had done so, would they have understood their significance. But they could scarcely avoid seeing the idol in its niche; and just as they were stepping out of the carriage a bright little lad, attractively robed in a white gown with a red vest above, evidently a singing-boy from the church hard by, passed through the doorway, bowing reverently to the sacred image as he went up the steps.