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Page 3
"Do you know anything about Madame Du Barry?" asked Eric; "didn't she
have her head chopped off?"
"She was another great lover of gardening," said Harvey, evasively; "in
fact, I believe the well known rose Du Barry was named after her, and now
I think you had better play for a little and leave your lessons till
later."
Harvey retreated to the library and spent some thirty or forty minutes in
wondering whether it would be possible to compile a history, for use in
elementary schools, in which there should be no prominent mention of
battles, massacres, murderous intrigues, and violent deaths. The York
and Lancaster period and the Napoleonic era would, he admitted to
himself, present considerable difficulties, and the Thirty Years' War
would entail something of a gap if you left it out altogether. Still, it
would be something gained if, at a highly impressionable age, children
could be got to fix their attention on the invention of calico printing
instead of the Spanish Armada or the Battle of Waterloo.
It was time, he thought, to go back to the boys' room, and see how they
were getting on with their peace toys. As he stood outside the door he
could hear Eric's voice raised in command; Bertie chimed in now and again
with a helpful suggestion.
"That is Louis the Fourteenth," Eric was saying, "that one in
knee-breeches, that Uncle said invented Sunday schools. It isn't a bit
like him, but it'll have to do."
"We'll give him a purple coat from my paintbox by and by," said Bertie.
"Yes, an' red heels. That is Madame de Maintenon, that one he called
Mrs. Hemans. She begs Louis not to go on this expedition, but he turns a
deaf ear. He takes Marshal Saxe with him, and we must pretend that they
have thousands of men with them. The watchword is _Qui vive_? and the
answer is _L'etat c'est moi_--that was one of his favourite remarks, you
know. They land at Manchester in the dead of the night, and a Jacobite
conspirator gives them the keys of the fortress."
Peeping in through the doorway Harvey observed that the municipal dust-
bin had been pierced with holes to accommodate the muzzles of imaginary
cannon, and now represented the principal fortified position in
Manchester; John Stuart Mill had been dipped in red ink, and apparently
stood for Marshal Saxe.
"Louis orders his troops to surround the Young Women's Christian
Association and seize the lot of them. 'Once back at the Louvre and the
girls are mine,' he exclaims. We must use Mrs. Hemans again for one of
the girls; she says 'Never,' and stabs Marshal Saxe to the heart."
"He bleeds dreadfully," exclaimed Bertie, splashing red ink liberally
over the facade of the Association building.
"The soldiers rush in and avenge his death with the utmost savagery. A
hundred girls are killed"--here Bertie emptied the remainder of the red
ink over the devoted building--"and the surviving five hundred are
dragged off to the French ships. 'I have lost a Marshal,' says Louis,
'but I do not go back empty-handed.'"
Harvey stole away from the room, and sought out his sister.
"Eleanor," he said, "the experiment--"
"Yes?"
"Has failed. We have begun too late."
LOUISE
"The tea will be quite cold, you'd better ring for some more," said the
Dowager Lady Beanford.
Susan Lady Beanford was a vigorous old woman who had coquetted with
imaginary ill-health for the greater part of a lifetime; Clovis Sangrail
irreverently declared that she had caught a chill at the Coronation of
Queen Victoria and had never let it go again. Her sister, Jane
Thropplestance, who was some years her junior, was chiefly remarkable for
being the most absent-minded woman in Middlesex.
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