There were beautiful faces there, neither old nor young, of middle-aged women, rather sad, rather anxious, rather worn. They were the women who had suffered the strain of war most in their souls, with long patient agony. The mothers of fighting men, the wives of others. He could see in their eyes that they remembered things which he remembered, which others forget. Among them was the beautiful Lady Martock, in her widow’s weeds.
The Duke of Bramshaw led Lady Ottery to her chair on the platform, and there was a clapping of hands, and a scuttling to places.
Joyce took her seat, and her face was eager and proud because of this public tribute to her mother. Her father, who had come in late, with Alban, sat next to her on her left hand. His face wore his usual vacant look, with slightly opened mouth.
“Your mother’s marvellous!” he said to Joyce in a loud voice, which she “hushed” immediately, and after that rebuke, he settled himself deliberately to sleep. He had heard a good deal at home about the Religion of Revolution. It was not new to him, and he had acquired the habit of sleep in the House of Lords and during all speeches.
Alban, on his father’s left, wonderfully good-looking, dressed almost as well as Kenneth Murless, kept awake, but appeared painfully bored. He too, was aware of his mother’s theory. He avoided it as much as possible, while agreeing with its general thesis. Out of filial respect and devotion he had come to-day, at some personal sacrifice in the way of a game of real tennis at the Bath Club, which was a passion of his.
The Duke of Bramshaw opened with some general observations on the subject of Lady Ottery’s lecture. He was a thin man, with a long, mournful face, a sharply curved nose, and a bald head. Caricaturists made him look like a diseased bird of prey. In the clubs he was generally known as “the greyhound,” because he made a little hair go a long way.
In melancholy tones he referred to the honour he had in introducing the Countess of Ottery, who, indeed, needed no introduction to such an audience as he saw before him, well aware of her devoted work during the War, of her great virtue as a wife and mother, of her noble patriotism, and of her profound scholarship. They were to receive the benefit of her historical knowledge that afternoon.
He himself had been a student of history, as far as his duties in the House of Lords would permit, and other services which he had been called to do for his King and Country, but he confessed that he had been amazed by the revelations which Lady Ottery had discovered in relation to a continuous tradition of revolutionary doctrine, of a most subversive, destructive, and damnable kind—if they would permit him to use so strong a word—from the time of the Fourteenth Century to the present day.
Lady Ottery had made it quite clear to him, he felt sure that she would make it quite clear to the audience—that the revolutionary spirit which they found in the world around them, not only in Russia, but nearer home, in their very midst, he regretted to say, was due to the dreadful propaganda of a secret cult, mainly of German-Jewish origin, which had for its object the overthrow of civilisation, the downfall of Christian morality, no less than the destruction of all law and order. The members of that cult, the Initiated, as they called themselves, were but few, but they were powerful.
As Lady Ottery would tell them, they belonged to the tradition of Satan worship, that dark and evil blasphemy of the Middle Ages. It was an awful thought that men in England belonged to that secret brotherhood. They were working among the labouring classes of England. They were, he said so with a frankness which the gravity of the time demanded, endeavouring to promote at that very hour, a Strike which threatened to paralyse the life and industry of Great Britain. The Countess of Ottery was not, therefore, lecturing on an academic theory of history, unrelated to their present situation.