It was characteristic of Rosamund that she had always been not only bewildered but wearied by the broadmindedness, or rather the indiscriminate intellectual hospitality of a man like Douglas Murrel. To her it appeared mere vagueness and emptiness and absence of object. She could never comprehend how he could be at once an intimate friend of Olive and her medievalism and of Braintree and his Bolshevism. She wanted somebody who would do something; and Murrel absolutely refused to do anything. But when somebody was really ready to do something, she was so pleased that she rather neglected to criticise what it was that he was going to do.
Quite suddenly, and perhaps accidentally, there had become clear to her very single eye something like a ray of light that she could follow; something that she could understand. Doubtless she understood it better because it was linked up in a loose fashion with the traditions that she had been taught from childhood to preserve. She had never bothered about her father’s taste in heraldry; she had not even seen very much of her father. But just as she was glad that her father was there, she was glad the heraldry was there. People who have that sort of historical support always remember it, if only in their subconsciousness. Anyhow, the obvious inference was incorrect, and people soon began to say that she was actually encouraging the librarian in his capacity of lunatic.
It is almost needless to say that the daughter of Lord Seawood moved about trailing clouds of glory in the form of crowds of young men. She had indeed a threefold claim to that sort of popularity. She was an heiress; but it is due to them to say that many of the more chivalrous admired her not because she was an heiress but because she was beautiful. She was beautiful, but it is due to her to say that many of the more rational admired her not because she was a beauty but because she was a good sort; and more especially what they called a good sport. It followed, therefore that where she led many would follow, even if she led them a dance quite different from the dances then in fashion. Thus there grew up, half in jest and yet more and more in earnest, a new fashionable “medievalism”; a chase in which all the young men followed the lady who followed the librarian. And because there was a certain candour of calf-love about it, of the moon-calf who is not ashamed to cry for the moon, it had something in it of the sincerity of youth and springtime. It was a romance as well as a rag. The young men became in a manner poets, if very minor poets. With the help of Herne as a scholar and Rosamund as a vigorous stage-manager, they filled their lines with emblems and ensigns and processions, even more defiant of modernity than the theatrical dress which they had dropped and Herne had retained. The young men were especially fascinated by the notion of reviving the use of the bow; possibly with a subconscious memory of the arrows of the god of love. Perhaps it was some foolish association of Valentine’s that started the game of sending arrows as messengers of welcome or of war.
Archery was a fashion in the Victorian time; and many Victorian ladies and gentlemen may have hovered about the lawns of Seawood Abbey, engaged in that graceful sport; many may even have revisited the scene as mildly astonished ghosts in long whiskers and peg-top trousers or in cloudy crinolines swaying and floating like balloons. Many distinguished Victorian characters had doubtless honoured the amusement; but they did it within certain visible Victorian limitations. They shot their arrows correctly at targets and not (unaccountably) at top-hats. They used but few of those giant gestures that have belonged in the past to the great bows of the heroes. Sir Robert Peel, if prudent as Ulysses, did not turn, saying, “Now I will shoot at another mark,” and transfix with his shaft the highly decorated waistcoat of Mr. Disraeli. It is nowhere recorded that Lord Derby balanced an apple on the top of the top-hat of Lord Stanley, and then grimly informed the Prime Minister (let us say Lord Aberdeen) that he was keeping another arrow for higher political uses. Lord Palmerston, though actually known by the nick-name of Cupid, did not attract the attention of such ladies as he favoured by transfixing their Victorian bonnets in this airy fashion. Lord Shaftesbury seldom appeared in the character and costume of the archer on the Shaftesbury Fountain; and it is an error to suppose that he is there represented. Above all, it certainly never occurred to the celebrated Rowland Hill that shooting arrows about in all directions might be made a substitute for the Penny Post. There was, therefore, no real historical precedent for the state of affairs that began to develop rapidly at Seawood Abbey, under the influence of the escaped librarian.
This last idea, of conveying casual communications to persons at some little distance, by sending a winged missile singing past their heads or crashing into their windows, seemed especially to have taken Mr. Herne’s fancy; and it was by this means that he and his misguided group of sympathisers (who were beginning to enter into the fun of the thing) delivered to a large number of persons their proclamation of the New Regime. To describe at length all the details involved in the New Regime would involve the transcription of a considerable number of scrolls or strips of paper, which were conveyed to the neighbours in this rapid if not efficient manner. They all bore the title of The League of the Lion; and were apparently an appeal to all persons to imitate the better qualities of King Richard the First and the Crusaders, under conditions that could not be considered favourable to the enterprise. The astonished citizen was informed that England had now reached a crisis in which moral courage alone could save her; if it were only the moral courage required to aim a bow at a venture when engaged in dropping a line to a friend. But there was a great deal more of a more sincere sort, not without a certain juvenile eloquence, protesting against that suicidal pessimism of the great reactionary who declared that the age of chivalry was past.
Needless to say, most of the people who received these missives were amused; some were annoyed; and some, strangely enough perhaps, were rather relieved and revived, as if they had seen some game of their childhood or ideal of their boyhood rise suddenly from the dead. But it cannot be said that the appeal as it stood was adapted to the typical visitors to Lord Seawood’s country seat. Noblemen and gentlemen who had come down to shoot were often quite vexed to be told by an ardent and enthusiastic person, dressed entirely in bright green, that this was the real definition of good shooting at a little place in the country. Venerable sportsmen, who considered themselves crack shots, were not soothed when the librarian patiently and kindly explained to them how cramped, how hunchbacked, how ungainly, was the crouching attitude of one holding a gun, compared with the god-like lift and leap in the figure that has just discharged an arrow, frozen as it is forever in the stillness of the Apollo Belvedere. In short, the further afield the arrows fared, the less likely it seemed that they would really have the softening effects of the arrows of the God of Love. And this seemed to reach to a remote extreme of improbability in the very last extent or extremity of their travels; when the flying herald of chivalry had actually reached so distant and impenetrable a mark as to arouse the attention of the master of the house.