The Rev. Stacy's father had really been a very pushing Agent for a firm of Decorators and Wall-paper designers: so he replied with a sigh: "A great, great traveller, dear lady; a man who loved Colour and Design better than his immortal soul, I fear.... It's to you to cut...."

But Sibyl had not confined her Highland house-party to these worn-out fribbles. Bream had his uses. He would be there to assoil a guest who might get shot in the shooting, and so perhaps save the unpleasantness of an inquest; and his stories of people on the fringe of Society were the equivalent and the accompaniment in midnight chat—just before you took your bedroom candle—of pâté-de-foie sandwiches and cherry brandy. Vicky Masham kept you right with Queen Victoria; Lucy was a reminder to her not to make a fool of herself with Roger ... perhaps also there was a little gratitude in her hard nature for the good a year of Lucy's society had wrought in her little son's health and disposition. But she wanted—more than ever at thirty-six—to be a political woman, to make a difference in the world, hand her name down in history, change or shape history in fact. It had occurred to her, as it did to fifty other mature, handsome, well-placed women of ambition, to marry Cecil Rhodes; but the Jacobzoon Raid and still more the eager rivalry of other ladies, perfectly shameless in their frontal attacks on the Colossus, soon thwarted any such idea ... reduced it indeed, to such a ridiculous impossibility that it was only confided to her locked diary. She had fortunately withdrawn her half-promise from Sir Elijah Tooley at the very first hint that there was a crack in his reservoir of wealth. Otherwise—with a couple of millions of his money ... and he could have had his own suite of apartments, and she would have stopped him waxing his moustaches ... she might have over-turned her world.... Then there was Count Balanoff, the Russian Ambassador, a widower....

"You know," she said to Roger in one of her many smoking-room tête-à-tête confidences—"he is 'richissime,' and really rather decent, though he does dye his hair.... Gold mines in Siberia, turquoise mines in the Caucasus.... He seemed quite to want to marry me, at one time.... Vicky Masham thinks it was the Queen who interposed. If he'd asked me and I'd accepted I should have made myself in no time the most talked-about woman in Europe. I'd have negotiated an alliance with Russia—always an idea of mine—and have paid the Kaiser out for his Kruger telegram—Why is it, Roger, there isn't a rush to marry me? I've ten thousand a year for life; I'm only thirty-six, which nowadays is equivalent to twenty-six; I've a splendid constitution, my hair's my own and so are my teeth, my figure is perfect.... I might be an artist's model for the 'tout ensemble.' ... And yet ... (a pause for smoking).

"And it isn't as though the re-marriage of titled women was 'mal vu' at Court any longer.... There's Lady Landolphia Birchall. She's going to be married again in the autumn; this time to a 'booky'—for he really is nothing more, though he takes bets with the Prince. And she's turned fifty. But the Queen doesn't seem to mind...."

But to return to the theme from which this digression started. Sibyl had asked four great Imperialists down to Glen Sporran to make Roger's acquaintance: the Honble. Darcy Freebooter, Percy Bracket—Editor of the Sentinel—the Right Honble. J. Applebody Bland, and Albert Greystock, grandson of old Lord Bewdly. She would have liked to have captured Mr. Rudyard Kipling, but he had perversely gone to the United States, a region which lay outside Sibyl's calculations, since we could neither annex it nor protect it. She had even tried to include the great Choselwhit in the company, the mysterious idol before whom and whose non-committal eyeglass so much imperialistic incense was then burnt. But he had answered coldly, in an undistinguished handwriting, that he regretted a previous engagement.

"I don't mind admitting, it's rather a snub," she said to her quite indifferent cousin, "and it vexes me because he is the coming man. It is he we must look to, to lead the Unionist, the Imperial Party; not those effete Brinsleys with their antiquated love of Free Trade and the Church of England.... I'm very much 'in' just now with Laura Sawbridge ... you know, that clever woman-writer and traveller. She says she can turn Chocho round her little finger. It was he who sent her out to ... (rest whispered). Well, you see what that means? Chocho is lying low, but he means to get even with old Kruger and paint the Transvaal red...."

Whether anything much, except distrust and disgust, resulted from bringing Roger Brentham within the same four walls, into the same shooting parties, bridge contests and bicycling excursions as these distinguished Imperialists, it is hardly worth inquiring. Imperialism is dead, and I, as an old Imperialist, am moribund, and most of the people mentioned are no longer of this world. Probably Roger thought Darcy Freebooter what all collateral younger sons of his stock had been for three centuries: it was described by his surname. Percy Bracket, he defined mentally as quite ignorant of the Empire he unceasingly boomed (not without a practical purpose, for he expected most company promoters to give him a block of paid-up shares or "let him in on the ground floor "). The Rt. Honble. Applebody Bland reminded Roger of Mr. Quale in Bleak House, whose mission it was to be enthusiastic about everybody else's mission ... and recalled to Lucy, by the jets of saliva which accompanied his easily provoked eloquence, her special African horror, the Spitting Cobra. And Albert Greystock was too good for this world. He believed any one who advocated enlarging the British Empire was a pure-souled missionary of civilization, incapable of a base greed for gain or other interested motive. He also believed that once a backward or savage country had been painted red on the map there was nothing more to be done or said. There it was: saved, happy, and gratefully contented.

These people all said in turn "it was monstrous"—a man who could in six years accomplish such encouraging results in a part of Africa unfortunately for the time being under Germany must be brought back to British Administration. Choselwhit must be seen, Wiltshire button-holed, the Rothschilds nudged, and Rhodes got round....

Roger, however, was not going to risk the substance for the shadow or be disloyal in the slightest degree to the generous Schräders. He would buckle-to, make his pile, bank it; and then, perhaps, weigh in, scatter the chaff and garner the grains of Imperialism. And of one thing he was jolly well sure—thinking back on his faithful Somalis, his cheery Wanyamwezi, on the well-mannered, manly Masai, the graceful Iraku, and the obedient Wambugwe: he would see that the Black men and Brown men reaped full advantage for the White man's intrusion into their domain. They should receive compensation for disturbance and be brought into partnership, not only of labour and effort, but of profit.

CHAPTER XX