“Well,” gasped Archer, “and how long is this to be allowed.”
The noise had somewhat subsided as in weariness; and each man looked at the other as if really wondering what would come next.
Lord Eden had risen slowly and lazily to his feet, with his hands thrust in his trousers’ pockets.
“Mention has been made,” he said, “of somebody being charged with insanity. I am sorry that a painful scene of the sort should have occurred in this place; but isn’t it time some humane person interfered?”
“Somebody send for a doctor,” cried Archer in a crowing and excited voice.
“You appointed him yourself, Eden,” said Murrel, looking sharply over his shoulder.
“We all make mistakes,” said Eden soberly. “I’ll never deny that the lunatic has the laugh of me. But it’s a rather unpleasant scene for the ladies.”
“Yes,” said Braintree. “The ladies have an opportunity of admiring the grand finale of all your loyalty and your vows.”
“If,” said the Arbiter calmly, “it be an end of your loyalty to me, it is not an end of my loyalty to you; or to the law that I have sworn to expound. It is nothing for me to stand down from this seat; but it is everything to speak the truth while I stand here; and it is less than nothing whether you hate the truth or no.”
“You were always a play-actor,” called out Julian Archer angrily.
A strange smile passed over the pale face of the judge.
“There,” he said, “you are singularly wrong. I was not always a play-actor; I was a very humble and humdrum person until you wanted me and made me a play-actor. But I found the play you acted was something much more real than the life you led. The rhymes we spoke in mummery on that lawn were so much more like life than any life that you were living then. And how very like what we are living now.” His voice did not change but seemed to roll on more rapidly, as if verse were more natural than prose.
He stood down suddenly from the dais; and seemed to look taller for the fall.
“If I cease to be king or judge,” he cried, “I shall still be a knight; though it be, as in the play, a knight-errant. But you will all be play-actors. Rogues and vagabonds, where did you steal your spurs?”
A spasm of something indescribable, like a twitch of involuntary humiliation, crossed the crabbed face of old Eden and he said testily, “I wish this scene would end.”
It could only have one ending. Braintree was glowing with a dark exultation; but the men about him understood almost as little of the decision in their favour as the men in front; and in any case the latter were long past letting them intervene. And all that chivalric company answered with murmurs or sombre silence the appeal of their late leader for support. In answer to that call only two of them moved. From the outer skirts of the crowd Olive Ashley came slowly forward with the movement of a princess and, casting one darkly radiant look at the leader of the labourers, took her station by the judgment-seat. She did not dare to look at the white and stony face of the woman who was her friend. A moment after Douglas Murrel lounged to his feet with a singular grimace and went to stand on the opposite side of the Arbiter. They seemed like strange repetitions, and even parodies, of the lady and the squire who had held the shield and sword on either side of him, on the day when he was crowned.
Standing before his judgment-seat, the judge made one last ritual gesture like the rending of the robes of old. He rent from him the long dark robe of black and purple which was his judicial vestment, and letting it fall stood up in the complete suit of close fitting green which he had always worn since the dramatic day after the drama.
“I will go forth as a real outlaw,” he said, “and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.”
He turned his back on them and for a moment his wild glance seemed to stray hither and thither round the empty throne.
“Have you lost anything?” asked Murrel.
“I have lost everything,” replied Herne and Murrel looked for a moment into his ghastly eyes.
Then he saw what he was seeking and picked up the great spear that had gone with his forester’s garb and strode away towards the gateways of the park.
Murrel remained staring after him for a moment and then, as if propelled by a new impulse, ran after him down the path, hailing him by name. The man in green turned and looked at him with a pale and patient face.
“I say,” said Murrel, “may I come with you?”
“Why should you come with me?” asked Herne, not rudely but rather as if he were addressing a stranger.
“Don’t you know me?” asked Murrel. “Don’t you know my name? Well, perhaps you don’t know my real name.”
“What do you mean?” asked Herne.
“My name,” said the other, “is Sancho Panza.”
Twenty minutes later there passed from the lands of Lord Seawood a cortege eminently calculated to show how the grotesque dogs the footprints of the fantastic. For Mr. Douglas Murrel had by no means the intention of losing his faculty of enjoying the absurd with a complete gravity. The last stage of that exit was worth seeing, though only a few of the strayed revellers or rioters were there to see it. As soon as Murrel had obtained the post of squire for which he petitioned, he vanished behind an adjoining outhouse and reappeared perched on the top of his celebrated hansom cab and driving its crazy cab-horse. Bowing from his perch with the deference of a polished servant, he appeared to be inviting his new master to get into the cab. But there was to be one more crescendo or bathos and medley of the sublime and the ridiculous; for with one last impulse of outrageous solemnity, the knight-errant in green sprang astride of the cab-horse and signalled with his lifted spear.
Like a revelation of lightning, in the instant before annihilating laughter came down like night, those who saw it saw a vision and a memory, bright and brittle as an instant’s resurrection of the dead. The bones of the gaunt, high-featured face, the flame-like fork of the beard, the hollow and almost frantic eyes, were in a setting that startled with recognition; rigid above the saddle of Rosinante, tall and in tattered arms he lifted that vain lance that for three hundred years has taught us nothing but to laugh at the shaking of the spear. And behind him rose a vast yawning shadow like the very vision of that leviathan of laughter; the grotesque cab like the jaws of a derisive dragon pursuing him for ever, as the vast shadow of caricature pursues our desperate dignity and beauty, hanging above him for ever threatening like the wave of the world; and over all, the lesser and lighter human spirit, not unkindly, looking down on all that is most high.
And yet, though that towering and toppling appendage of absurdity was dragged behind him like an overwhelming load, for that instant of time it was erased and forgotten, in the force and appalling passion of his face.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SECRET OF SEAWOOD
It had been a day of amazement for many, in which their prophet who had come to bless had remained to curse and had at last gone away cursing. But of all those who were shocked at the judgment which had condemned them, perhaps not one had been more amazed than the man whom the judgment had justified. John Braintree stood staring throughout the whole process by which what seemed to him like laws of the Stone Age were dug up like stone hatchets and offered to him as weapons. Whatever else he had expected, whether feudal vindictiveness or chivalrous magnanimity, he had never dreamed of hearing his own cause supported as a piece of pure medievalism. So far as he could make out, he himself was much the most medieval person present. It made him feel very uncomfortable.