It was not an unimportant matter that the Duchess of Trent should have held these views. Money is always important, and the Duchess was one of a very large moneyed class who were always ready to open their purses on behalf of their favourite propaganda. The infidel and the sinner were supposed to be reached by the ordinary machinery of the Church, and the Papist and the Jew had been wellnigh abandoned as hopeless, though a few Englishmen of the lower class still prowled through countries like Spain and Portugal, distributing Protestant tracts and increasing the dislike felt for their nation. But the great field for missionary effort, of course, was that section of mankind labelled idolaters or heathen. In the spirit of the hymn which singles out the inoffensive Buddhists of Ceylon to brand them with the epithet vile, the good Duchess firmly believed that to thrust, not merely the theology, but the morals, social customs, marriage institutions, language, manners, and even clothing of her own age and country upon all the peoples of the earth was a Divine injunction to be neglected at her peril.
This generous zeal had long been encouraged by the statesmen of the Raj, who saw its possessions widened without the expense of arms. The British Empire resembles no other that has ever existed in having come into existence unconsciously. England has sent forth her outlaws on the shores of distant continents, and they have come back soldiers for her. Her merchants have gone forth seeking merchandise, and realms Alexander sighed for have fallen like ripe fruit into their hands. Her missionaries have Anglicized where they should have Christianized; the bigoted worshippers of Allah and Vishnu imitate the language of Macaulay, and every new church in Africa gives a new cotton-mill to Lancashire.
Dr. Coles had a more personal argument in store for the Duchess of Trent.
“Surely you cannot be very bigoted against the Legitimists,” he urged. “I thought that all the old Scotch families were Jacobites at heart. And Lord Alistair Stuart is a member of the Guild.”
“I have heard my mistress, the Queen, say: ‘I am the greatest Jacobite of them all,’” the Duchess responded. “But I don’t think she ever expected to hear of real Jacobites in the twentieth century. I don’t take your friends very seriously, Dr. Coles, and I dare say my son doesn’t either.”
Before the discussion could be carried further Alistair himself came into view. His mother watched him anxiously, half afraid of seeing him accord the same homage to Dr. Coles as the others. But whether because he was wanting in reverence for Armenia, or because he was ashamed to show greater respect to a man than to his own mother, Stuart contented himself with shaking hands with the priest, after he had previously greeted his parent.
He was surprised at first to see her at such a function. But the diplomacy of the Duchess was very transparent. She at once turned to Hero, and pronounced the formula which entitles two people in English society to know of each other’s existence.
It was the first time Alistair had seen Miss Vanbrugh, but not the first time he had heard her name. The eyes of society are very keen where a man like the Duke of Trent and Colonsay is concerned, and its whispering-gallery is very wide. Although the Duke himself had never given any significance to his intercourse with Hero, the correct significance had already been given to it by others, and the rumour had reached Lord Alistair. For him the girl who stood before him was the girl who was on the point of becoming his brother’s betrothed.
He raised his eyes to her face, and when he saw that picture of calm, sweet maidenhood, with all the bloom of youth and purity upon it, and those eyes radiant with high and happy thoughts, and when he recalled that other face he had just quitted, with the paint peeling off under the haggard eyes, and the cracked lips set in a querulous scowl because he had not dared to bring her into the company of reputable women, and when he compared his own lot, cast with that unhappy creature, with the life that lay before his brother, blest in so dear a wife, then his heart failed him, and he had to turn away his eyes to hide the unexpected smart.
On her part Hero was not much less moved. She saw standing before her the figure around which her imagination had already woven its romance, and he was handsomer than the hero of her romance. The gracefully-knit form, with its statuesque neck and curling dark hair, breathed the very spirit of the lays of Oisin. The swish of the heather was still in his elastic tread, the sunlight of the rain-washed Hebrides was in his glance. She seemed to see him in his kilt and plaid, the eagle’s feather nodding in his bonnet, and the claymore by his side, a young chieftain of the glens, starting at daybreak from his bed among the fern, and setting forth perhaps to woo a maiden like herself with the immemorial charms of song and dance. In the strait garb of the decorous capital he seemed to her like a shorn Samson, and she thought of violets fading in a city garret, and skylarks caged in a dark cellar beating their wings in want of light and air.