He remained standing thus for a moment; then as Archer darted back to his own dressing room, the librarian slowly followed him and betook himself to his own apartments adjoining the library.
One other person remained as if stunned with thought, though the performance had long been over. And that was the writer of the play; who did not feel in the least as if she had written it. Olive Ashley felt as if she had merely struck a match at midnight and it had burst and broadened into the unearthly splendours of the midnight sun. She felt as if she had painted one of her gold and crimson angels and the painted face had spoken, and spoken terrible things. For the eccentric librarian, turned for an hour into a pantomime king, might have been possessed of a devil. Only the devil had been a little like the gold and crimson angel. Something seemed to come pouring out of him that nobody had ever thought was in him; and which the poet could not claim to have put in him. He seemed to her to span and take in his stride all the abysses and the heights known to the secret humility of the artist. She did not seem to be hearing the verses she had written. They sounded like the verses she would have liked to have written. She had not only excitement but expectation. For he had the power of making each line seem greater than the last; and yet they were only her own pretty tolerable verses. The moment which glowed in her memory, and in that of many much less sensitive, was that in which the King, who had been captured as an outlaw, refused the offer of his own crown and declared that in a world of wicked princes he preferred the wandering life of the woods.
A shadow fell across her upon the grass; and preoccupied as she was she seemed to know even the shape of the shadow. Braintree reclothed and in his right mind (which some considered a very wrong mind) had joined her in the garden.
Before he could speak, she had said impulsively: “I’ve discovered something. It’s more natural to talk poetry than to talk prose. Just as there’s more spontaneity in singing than in stammering. Only, you see, most of us stammer.”
“Your librarian certainly didn’t stammer,” said Braintree. “You might almost say he sang. I’m a pretty prosaic person; but I feel somehow as if I’d been listening to good music. It all seems very mysterious. When a librarian can act a King like that, there seems to be only one possible inference; that he has only been acting a librarian. And excellent as he was as the King, I consider his creation of the part of an embarrassed bookworm in the library was an even more finished performance. Do theatrical stars often come and conceal themselves behind bookcases in this way?”
“You think he was always acting,” said Olive, “and I know he was never acting. That is the explanation.”
“I fancy you are right,” he answered. “But couldn’t you have sworn you were in the presence of a great actor?”
“No, no; that is just the point,” she cried sharply. “I could have sworn I was in the presence of a great man.”
After a pause she went on: “I don’t mean a great acting man like Garrick or Irving or somebody. I mean a great dead man–most awfully alive. I mean a medieval man: a man risen out of the grave.”
“I know what you mean,” assented the other, “and of course you are quite right. You mean that he couldn’t have taken any other part. Your friend Mr. Archer could have taken any other part; but he is only a good actor.”
“It all seems so strange,” said Olive. “Why should Mr. Herne out of the library be–like that?”
“I think I know why,” said Braintree, and his voice deepened to something like a growl. “In a sense that nobody understands he really does take it seriously. And so do I; I take it damned seriously.”
“Do you mean my play?” she asked with a smile.
“I consented to put on those troubadour togs and act,” he said, “I couldn’t give a greater proof of devotion than that.”
“I mean,” she said a little hastily, “what do you mean about taking the King’s part seriously?”
“I don’t like Kings,” replied Braintree rather roughly. “I don’t like Knights and nobles and all that parade of armed aristocracy. But that man likes them. He doesn’t only pretend to like them. He is not a snob or a silly flunkey of old Seawood. He is the only man I have ever seen who might really defy democracy and the revolution, I know it simply from the way he strode about that silly stage and spoke–”
“And spoke those silly verses, you were going to say,” said the poetess, pointing at him with a finger and laughing with a curious indifference rather rare among poetesses. It almost seemed as if she had found something that interested her more than poetry.
But it was one of Braintree’s more virile qualities that he was never easily forced into flippancy; and he went on in his quiet pulverising fashion, a man always meditating with a clenched fist.
“I tell you when he was right on top, and seemed to tower over everything, when he said he would chuck away his sceptre and go wandering in the woods again with a spear, I knew–”
“Why here he is,” cried Olive hastily and lowering her voice, “and the joke of it is that he is still wandering in the woods with a spear.”
For indeed Mr. Herne was still in the theatrical costume of an Outlaw, having apparently forgotten to change his clothes when he drifted to his dressing-room; and the long hunting-spear on which he leaned in his blank verse soliloquies was still grasped unconsciously in his hand.
“I say,” exclaimed Braintree, “aren’t you going to get into any other clothes before lunch?”
The librarian looked at his legs again and said in a dull voice, “What other clothes?”
“I mean your ordinary clothes,” replied Braintree.
“Oh never mind now,” said the lady, “you’d better change after lunch now, I should think.”
“Yes,” replied the abstracted automaton, in the same wooden voice, and took his long green legs and spear away with him.
The lunch was pretty informal anyhow; and though all the others had managed to get out of their theatrical costumes, they had not all thoroughly got back into their conventional ones. Some of them, especially the ladies, were in a transitional state before the full splendours of the afternoon. For there was that afternoon at Seawood Abbey a grand political and social reception eclipsing even that which had attempted the education of Mr. Braintree. Needless to say it contained most of the same unmistakable figures with many more in addition. Sir Howard Pryce was there, wearing if not the white flower of a blameless life at least the white waistcoat of a Victorian merchant, whose life was always assumed to be blameless. He had lately passed equally blamelessly from Soap to Dyes, of which he was a financial pillar and a partner in certain commercial interests of Lord Seawood. Mr. Aubrey Wister was there, wearing his exquisite blend of artistic and fashionable raiment; wearing also his long moustache and melancholy smile. Mr. Hanbury, squire and traveller, was there, wearing nothing that could be noticed in particular and wearing it very well. Lord Eden was there, wearing his single eyeglass and the hair that looked like a yellow wig. Mr. Julian Archer was there, wearing clothes so good that they are hardly ever seen on a living man but only on the ideal beings in tailors’ shops. And Mr. Michael Herne was there, still wearing a suit of green rags suitable to a royal outlaw in exile and quite unsuitable to the present occasion.