is suddenly
shaken up into a recognition of something supernatural, and does not as
yet know how to make the other fashions of his life fit in with this new
revelation. Selfish as he was, he would not have put off taking action
on the warning he had received from the Foreign Office if he had at the
time believed in the least that there was any possibility of a plot for
political assassination being carried on in an English country-house.
Soame Rivers reasoned, like a realistic novelist, from his own
experiences only. He regarded the notion of such things taking place in
an English country-house as no less an anachronism than the moving
helmet in the 'Castle of Otranto' or the robber-castle in the 'Mysteries
of Udolpho.' Not that we mean to convey the idea that Rivers had read
either of these elaborate masterpieces of old-fashioned fiction--for he
most certainly had not read either of them, and very likely had not even
heard of either. But if he had studied them he would probably have
considered them as quite as much an appurtenance of real life as any
story of a plot for political assassination carried on in an English
country-house. Now, however, it was plain that a warning had been given
which did not come from the fossilised officials of the Foreign Office,
and which impressed so cool an old soldier as Captain Sarrasin with a
sense of serious danger. As far as regarded all the ordinary affairs of
life, Rivers looked down on Sarrasin with a quite unutterable contempt.
Sarrasin was not a man to get in the ordinary way into Soame Rivers's
set; and Rivers despised alike anyone who was not in his set, and anyone
who was pushed, or who pushed himself, into it. He detested
eccentricities of all sorts. He would have instinctively disliked and
dreaded any man whose wife occasionally wore man's clothes and rode
astride. He considered all that sort of thing bad form. He chafed and
groaned and found his pain sometimes almost more than he could bear
under the audacious unconventionalities of Helena Langley. But he knew
that he had to put up with Helena Langley; he knew that she would
consider herself in no way responsible to him for anything she said or
did; and he only dreaded the chance of some hinted, hardly repressible
remonstrance from him provoking her to tell him bluntly that she cared
nothing about his opinion of her conduct. Now, however, as he thought of
Sarrasin, he found that he could not deny Sarrasin's coolness and
c