Patrine

“ Sherbrand agreed, as they moved on side by side, from islands of raw, glaring light into broad pools of lustreless darkness, their tall heads level, for Patrine carried her hat of silver spangles swinging from the top of the sunshade with the lengthy stick. "Sometimes, for weeks, the days slip by smoothly as the beads of a Rosary over a baby's finger. Then—bang-bang-bang! they explode—like a rocket fired by a signal-pistol—until things fizzle out into dulness again." ”

“ Among a dozen pairs of masculine eyes that followed the gallant womanly figure, crowned by the plumed hat of silver spangles and displayed in the frank unreticence of fashion by the semi-transparent sheath of glistening white, a pair very blue, very shiningly alert and interested, drew nearer until the elongated shadow of a small boy in Scout's uniform mingled upon the sunlit turf with the longer shadow of Patrine. ”

“ The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin, the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse, Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and bobbed and waved. ”

“ The long months of misery—the horror of the War—had been a dreadful dream. She heard the long br'r' of the electric hall-bell under the impetuous insistent finger—the small scurry of his entrance, a squawk from the maid who answered night-calls—a whispered word or two, and the clumping of the heavy little brogues upon the stairs. Would he trip at the corner where he always stubbed his toe? she wondered—and she plainly heard him stumble. Then her hair stiffened upon her head, and a long shudder rippled through her. The little clumping brogues had stopped before Patrine's bedroom door. ”

“ It was five o'clock and the breeze that smelt of heather and clover-hay and strawberries blew more strongly, straight from under the westering sun. Patrine drank in deep draughts of the buoyant sweetness. The leaden gyves had fallen from her limbs, the leaden weight had lifted from her bosom. She had recovered something of her old, elastic grace of movement, that even the sheath-skirt could not spoil. Looking at her, Sherbrand said to himself:
"She walks like a Highland hill-woman or a native girl of the Philippines. ”

“ But Death passed by in a blizzard of scorching gases, splinters of rending steel, gravel, and stones, splintered timber and pulverised soil, leaving a huge cloud of reddish-yellow billowing over the Plaine d'Amour. A brown powder that stank of verbena, thickly coated all visible objects. Hair, skin, and clothes were tinted to uniformity, and a smothering oppression burdened the lungs. Yet as Patrine lay gasping, nerveless, beaten, that fierce new-kindled instinct of protection lived in her, potent, vital with possibilities as the spark in the battery or the germ in the cell. ”

“ His hand touched hers and she drew it away, not before a keen, sharp thrill had traversed her. "Vile, hateful creature!" she said to the Patrine von Herrnung knew—the other woman within her, whom she loathed. "Is not it enough that you have done what you have done?" Then as she passed out into the night, feeling beneath her feet the roughness of the gravel walk that led between grass-plats studded with green painted chairs and little iron tables, a strange roaring filled her ears and hellish tongues of fire licked a sky of vivid blackness. ”

“ Her bosom rose in a sigh. "But it's possible to get awfully fed up with banging and fizzling. One can learn to long—just for a little dulness, as long as it means quiet and rest, and peace of mind."
That Patrine should voice such an aspiration was incredible even to the speaker. "How changed I must be!" she said to herself, as Sherbrand answered her:
"With heathery moors and towering scaurs, and galloping trout-rivers brabbling over lichened boulders—and Somebody one loves to talk to—one calls that kind of dulness a happy honeymoon!" ”

“ And yet this altered face of his, marred by the broad, new-healed scar that traversed the left cheek and temple, and the cloudy look of suffering in the prominent grey-blue eyes, was dearer than ever to Patrine.
How bravely the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre and the purple, green, and silver of the Belgian Order showed against the war-stained khaki. What woman living would not glory in such a lover, welcome the sacred charge, rejoice to be his guide and minister! ... "Oh, my blind eagle, to sit mateless in the darkness shall not be your fate, God being good to me!" ”

“ There's nothing worth having in the whole world," added the unconscious philosopher "unless it's real and true!"
"Am I not real?" Patrine asked, squeezing his shoulder.
"Now you are!" He said it with an effort of candour. "But when I saw you a minute ago, I wasn't—quite sure." He glanced up at her and asked shyly: "Why are you different since you have been away in Paris?"
"Different, how different?" She whipped her hand from his shoulder. Her black eyebrows knitted, and her face stiffened into the strange mask that had puzzled him, under the scrutiny of his clear blue eyes. ”

“ Her bosom heaved, her eyes were misty jewels, and out of the wonderful silence about them came to her the low, sweet soughing of her long-lost Wind of Joy.
She moved to Sherbrand, kissed him full upon the mouth, and called him: "Alan!" And a great cry broke from him—a cry of wonder, triumph, and joy. As his arms swept out to enfold her she knew that she had conquered. She had not been deceived in reading love between the formal lines.
"Life has nothing more to give!" was Patrine's thought as his arms held her. ”

“ How inexpressibly one had abominated oneself. How one had shrunk against the side of the taxicab, pretending to look after wretched little decadent Wyvenhoe and the unquenchable Mrs. Mallison—feigning sudden absorption in the Piccadilly shop-windows, to escape those clear undoubting eyes that pierced one to the very soul. To be thought good when one was wicked, pure when one was the other thing; believed candid when one was a living lie. Ah!—that not only pierced but scorched.
If anybody, a month or so back, had asked Patrine: "Are you a Christian?" ”

“ For thine is the might, and thine is the kingdom and the power. Amen.
The Patriarch then hands the Chlamys with its fibula to the Vestitores, who array the Emperor in it. (If however it is the son, or daughter, or the wife of an emperor who is to be crowned, the Patriarch hands the vestment to the Emperor, who himself puts it on the person to be crowned.)
The Patriarch then says the ‘Prayer over the Crown.’
Patriarch. Peace be to all.
Deacon. Bow your heads.
Patriarch. To Thee alone, King of mankind, has he to whom thou hast entrusted the earthly kingdom bowed his neck with us. ”

“ If the patricians justly despise me, let them also despise their own ancestors, whose nobility, like mine, had its origin in merit. They envy me the honor that I have received; let them also envy me the toils, the abstinence, and the perils, by which I obtained that honor. But they, men eaten up with pride, live as if they disdained all the distinctions that you can bestow, and yet sue for those distinctions as if they had lived so as to merit them. ”

“ Perhaps there never was a work accomplished among men of so great and important a nature as that of the foundation of a kingdom that never is to be destroyed. About six thousand years have passed away since the Government established by the Patriarchs, or by the first man, was commenced here on the earth. From that time until the present vast numbers and descriptions of Governments, some Patriarchal in their nature, others taking the form of kingdoms, others of empires and so forth, have been organized here on the earth. ”

“ Had the religious system of our oldest forefathers been established on these wise and perpetual foundations, we had now been pagans, and our priests druids. Had our Saxon conquerors been endued with the same wisdom and foresight, we had been worshipping Thor and Woden; and had our ancestors, three centuries ago, persevered in this spirit, we had been blind and priest-ridden papists. The greatest blessing that can befall a state, which is so rigid and inflexible in its institutions, is to be conquered by a people, who have a better government, and have made farther advances in the arts of life. ”

“ Patrista, who, thirsting for his country's good, has been, perforce, content to see all others rise and sway the crowd, while he has toiled in vain, shall shake the nation with his eloquence, and from his chair of state, whence go abroad the statutes he has framed, shall read again his earlier works, now rescued from the past to teach the young. ”

“ Patriarchs of the remotest ages, that obeyed the Lord God in regard to. their marriages and family organizations, have not disagreed with us, nor we with them, so far as we and they have obeyed the law of God. If there is any difference at all, it was more developed among them than it is among us, we being in our infancy. ”

“ The young patricians, too, all that were proudest and most conscious of their noble birth, had always been devoted to his interest, and, adhering to him now, with a fidelity that did him no good, aggravated his resentment with the expression of their indignation and condolence. ”

“ Although the patricians were kept as one family apart from the people, and jealously guarded in their aristocratic purity by the State, they were only equals of the poorest before the laws of their own creation, and their condescension to the people was frequent and great. ”

“ The word 'patrician' includes everything we can conceive of as most insolent and inhuman; and those apes in purple who disgrace the Imperial throne pick out the worst of them, the most cold-hearted and covetous, to make prefects of them. And as they are, so are their children! Everything which they in their vainglory regard as 'beneath them' they tread into the dust—and we—you and I, all who labor with their hands in the service of the state—we, in their dull eyes, are beneath them. Mark me, boy! To-day the governor's daughter, the patrician maiden, can smile at you because she needs you ”

“ What else?'
'If you are sincere, as I say, and moreover, if you possess the exalted and generous traits which we patricians ever claim for ourselves, show it them by giving their freedom one by one to those who are now slaves, even though it result in the loss of one half of your fortune. That will be a patrician act. What was begun in crime by others, cannot be perpetuated without equal crime in us. The enfranchised will soon mingle with the people, and, as we see every day, become one with it. ”

“ They were not a nobility or a privileged class as long as there was no less privileged class to distinguish them from. Their exclusive possession of power made the commonwealth in which they bore rule an aristocracy; but they were a democracy among themselves. We see indeed faint traces of distinction among the patricians themselves, which may lead us to guess that the equality of all patricians may have been won by struggles of unrecorded days, not unlike those which in recorded days brought about the equality of patrician and plebeian. ”

“ As he rode, his chaplain chanted or recited the offices. When challenged for these constantly repeated exercises, he would say, “If I spent twice as much time in dice and hawking, should I be so rebuked?” A woman, one day as he sat in court, exclaimed, “Fie! you are not King of France; you are only a king of friars, of priests, and of clerks. It is a great pity you ever were King of France; you should be turned out of your kingship.” ”

“ Therefore out of the earth of their flesh, being freed from the tares of sin and from the noxious weeds of vice by the ploughshare of evangelic and apostolic learning, and being fruitful in the growth of all virtues, did they, as the best and richest fruit, bring forth a son, whom, when he had at the font put off the old man, they caused to be named Patritius, as being the future father and patron of many nations ”

“ When the Saints have this established in their midst, you will see them all alike, where none can say that "such a person is richer than I am, and I have no right to associate with him." Neither can the rich look upon those that are poor, and say, "My children shall not marry with the poor, and unite with them in their festivities, &c., because I have more property than they;" all these things will be done away, and the principle of equality will be established, and all will be stewards of the Lord's property. ”

“ But are not all men of the same species? What can make a difference between one man and another but the endowments of the mind? For my part, I shall always look upon the bravest man as the noblest man. Suppose it were enquired of the fathers of such Patricians as Albinus and Bessia, whether, if they had their choice, they would desire sons of their character, or of mine: what would they answer, but that they should wish the worthiest to be their sons. If the Patricians have reason to despise me, let them likewise despise their ancestors, whose nobility was the fruit of their virtue. ”

“ There is to be no end to the increase of the old Patriarch, and, as his posterity increases, world on world will be created and brought into existence, and those children will be sent forth from the presence of the Patriarch to take upon themselves bodies, as we have done here in this world. ”

“ Their clans were Patriarch households, rude through war:
Old Pagan Rome had known them not; their Isle
Virgin to Christ had come. Oh how unlike
Her sons to those old Roman Senators,
Scorn of Germanus oft, who breathed the air
Fouled by dead Faiths successively blown out,
Or Grecian sophist with his world of words,
That, knowing all, knew nothing! Praise to Thee,
Lord of the night-time as the day, Who keep’st
Reserved in blind barbaric innocence,
Pure breed, when boastful lights corrupt the wise,
With healthier fruit to bless a later age. ”