Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
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English Edition · Branch 110 of 254
Chapter I · The Child of the Hills · pp. 131–138
The Keepers of the People
p. 132Round the corner of the narrow, sandy path came a girl to the spring, bearing a pitcher on her head; and the slanting sun rays burnished her yellow skin to gold. His grip on his rifle loosened; his eyes grew easy, and he gazed at the delicate face, framed in a cloud of lustrous black hair, the curved nostrils, the fierce, bright eyes. He admired the unripe beauty of the slender, supple figure, not yet full grown, but instinct with life; and said below his breath, “A child of the hills!”
She came to the spring, and bent down, holding her pitcher under the trickle, not ten feet from him. He rose to his feet with trained, careful quietness, leapt through the branches, and gripped her by the arms behind. She struggled for a breath with nervous, convulsive violence; then twisted round her head, and turned on him the scared, fierce face of a trapped panther. But as she gazed into his imperious, smiling eyes, the fierceness and fright faded out of her own, and her look changed to a dismayed amazement.
He loosed her, and still holding her eyes, said softly in her own tongue, “Give me to drink, daughter of the hills.”
She held her pitcher to his lips: he had held her in so unmoved a grip that the water was not spilled: peering into his face, as he drank, with a questioning of a growing disquiet. Then she said, in the thin music of the voice of an ungrown girl, “The face of a king of men — of the king of men who shall lead me through the ways of love to death — to death.”
Her voice lingered on the repeated word in a ring of wistful regret for the brightness of the world.
“Through the ways of love — yes. But to death? Who knows?” he said; and stood mastering her soul through the eyes that met his own without shrinking.
Slowly the light stole back into her face, as she admired him; she threw away her fear and her regrets with a little free movement of her hands, and said in a deeper, braver voice, “I know. But I shall follow with a light heart.”
“Yes, you will follow with a light heart,” he said, and held out his arms.
She leapt to him, and he caught her off her feet in his clasp.
Socrates
Reading The Keepers of the People · Book II, Chapter I · The Child of the Hills · Book II, Chapter I · The Child of the Hills · pp. 131–138
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Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Edgar Jepson’s The Keepers of the People begins as a late-Victorian lost-kingdom romance and becomes an unsettling political argument. Ralph Falcon moves from an English country house to the hidden state of Varandaleel, where laughter, secrecy, violence, education, and the duties of rulers are tested against one another.
Historical Text
The novel was first published in London in 1898 by C. Arthur Pearson. This reading text follows the owner-supplied critical edition, whose copy-text is the Methuen Colonial Library issue of the same year digitised by the Internet Archive. The supplied editorial note records the edition’s corrections, normalisations, limits, and unresolved textual risks.
About This Edition
This English Edition preserves the complete supplied text and apparatus: the introduction, reading guide, key words, plot outline, editorial note, both books and all thirty chapters, and the end notes. Its reader branches end at paragraph boundaries, with the original chapter structure and chapter page references mapped to the 1898 printing.
Rights
Edgar Jepson’s 1898 novel is in the public domain. The introduction, reader’s guide, key words, outline, editorial note, notes, editorial arrangement, and design of the supplied edition are © 2026 Diotimos Editions.