The Keepers of the People

OUTLINE OF THE NOVEL

Page numbers are those of the 1898 printing, taken from Jepson's own table of contents; they are given so that this edition can be used alongside the original. The divisions below are the argument's, not the chapters': where a movement runs across a chapter break, the break is not marked.

This outline gives away the whole plot, including the ending.

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BOOK I — IN ENGLAND (PP. 3–129)

1. The pleasant land (chs. i–iii, pp. 3–38)

Ralph Falcon walks out of a wood in Sussex into a glade at Quivern Court, where Ruth, Countess of Lisdor, is reading aloud to a thirteen-year-old girl called Althea Flodden. Four lines of verse about a Princess who followed a prince across the hills are the first words in the book, and they are the plot. He is the grandson of a baronet who left England eighty years ago; he has brought a letter from a father the Lisdors have never heard of, two bloodhounds, a chest of jewels and two servants whose tongues have been cut out.

The household assembles: Lord Lisdor, who is afraid of horses and fond of women; Prince Sergius Melinsky, a ruined Russian who is in love with Lady Lisdor. Ralph beats Melinsky at fencing and at tennis, and tells Lord Lisdor what he has come for — a wife, healthy and intelligent, to bear him an heir, "we think it right to keep the English strain pure." Lord Lisdor proposes Miss Agnes Freshington. Drunk, Melinsky lets slip that he has heard of a rich hidden country north of the mountains and means to take a brigade of Cossacks and seize it. Ralph throws him into a corner.

2. The women of England (chs. iv–vii, pp. 38–77)

Lady Hammersmith — Althea's mother, a professional campaigner — and Miss Freshington arrive, and across three dinner tables the creed of Varandaleel is stated for the first time, in answer to questions nobody understands they are asking. There are no missionaries on the estate because Ralph's father had them executed; there are no schools because reading and writing "were inexpedient; and were abolished"; the people worship Indra, and his father; the servants were made dumb because it is expedient; and he proposes, when he meets Melinsky again, to kill him. Miss Freshington, who has never been treated with indifference, falls in love and is subjugated. Melinsky sets his wolf-hound on Althea's muzzled dog for sport and is sent away. Lady Hammersmith removes Althea to London.