The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Patrician, by John Galsworthy

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Title: The Patrician

Author: John Galsworthy

Release Date: June 14, 2006 [EBook #2774]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PATRICIAN ***

Produced by David Widger

THE PATRICIAN

By John Galsworthy

PART I

CHAPTER I

Light, entering the vast room--a room so high that its carved ceiling
refused itself to exact scrutiny--travelled, with the wistful, cold
curiosity of the dawn, over a fantastic storehouse of Time. Light,
unaccompanied by the prejudice of human eyes, made strange revelation
of incongruities, as though illuminating the dispassionate march of
history.

For in this dining hall--one of the finest in England--the Caradoc
family had for centuries assembled the trophies and records of their
existence. Round about this dining hall they had built and pulled down
and restored, until the rest of Monkland Court presented some aspect
of homogeneity. Here alone they had left virgin the work of the old
quasi-monastic builders, and within it unconsciously deposited their
souls. For there were here, meeting the eyes of light, all those rather
touching evidences of man's desire to persist for ever, those shells of
his former bodies, the fetishes and queer proofs of his faiths, together
with the remorseless demonstration of their treatment at the hands of
Time.

The annalist might here have found all his needed confirmations; the
analyst from this material formed the due equation of high birth; the
philosopher traced the course of aristocracy, from its primeval rise in
crude strength or subtlety, through centuries of power, to picturesque
decadence, and the beginnings of its last stand. Even the artist might
here, perchance, have seized on the dry ineffable pervading spirit, as
one visiting an old cathedral seems to scent out the constriction of its
heart.

From the legendary sword of that Welsh chieftain who by an act of high,
rewarded treachery had passed into the favour of the conquering William,
and received, with the widow of a Norman, many lands in Devonshire,
to the Cup purchased for Geoffrey Car