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