The groups parted silently, almost respectfully, as His Grace of Wessex passed out of the room—a prisoner.
PART IV
HIS GRACE OF WESSEX
CHAPTER XXX
THOUGHTS
In the loneliness and silence of the Tower, the Duke of Wessex had had enough leisure to think.
One fatal autumn afternoon, and what a change in the destinies of his life! Yesterday he was the first gentleman in England, loved by many, feared by a few, reverenced by all as the perfect embodiment of national pride and national grandeur—almost a king.
And to-day?
But of himself, his own obvious fate, the shame and disgrace of his present position, he thought very little. Ever an easy-going philosopher, he had as yet kept the insouciance of the gamester who has staked and lost and is content to retire from the board. One thing more, remember! Life in those days was not the priceless treasure which later civilization would have us believe it. There was a greater simplicity of faith, a more childlike certitude in the great truths of futurity, which we in our epoch are so ready to cavil at.
If nations and individuals committed excesses of unparalleled cruelty in the name of their respective creeds, if men hated each other, tortured each other, destroyed one another, it was because they misunderstood the teachings of religion, and not because they ignored or disbelieved them.