“Oh, I can’t tell it all in a minute,” she exclaimed, almost impatiently. “Don’t you know there isn’t a Prime Minister now; not of that sort? The King-at-Arms is managing everything round here.”
And she gestured rather desperately towards that potentate, who was still sitting on his high seat; probably because he had forgotten to come down. The same reason had once detained him on the top of the library shelf.
Douglas Murrel seemed to take it all in with more composure than might have been expected; perhaps he remembered the incident in the library. But his demeanour towards the medieval monarch was scrupulously correct. He bowed slightly, and then dived into the interior of the hansom cab; and re-emerged, holding a shapeless parcel in one hand and his hat in the other. He seemed to have a difficulty in unwrapping the parcel with one hand, and he turned towards the throne with a very proper air of apology.
“Pardon me, Your Majesty,” he said. “May my family have the ancient and ancestral privilege of wearing its hat at Court? I feel sure something of that sort must have been given to us after we tried unsuccessfully to rescue the Princes in the Tower. You see, it’s so awkward holding a hat; but I have a great affection for this hat.”
If he expected to see any gleam of answering humour in the face of the fanatic above him, he was disappointed; but the King-at-Arms said with perfect gravity: “Most certainly be covered. It is only the intention in courtesy that counts. I doubt whether those who had such privileges really insisted on them; I seem to remember a King who said, very rightly, to such a privileged lord, ‘You have the right to wear your hat before me, but not before the ladies.’ In the same spirit, where (as in this case) the purpose is actually to oblige a lady, the form is obviously dispensed with.”
And he looked round in a reasonable manner, as if his logic had surely satisfied everybody as it satisfied him, and Douglas Murrel solemnly put on his hat and proceeded to take a prodigious number of wrappings off the parcel.
When it eventually emerged, it was a cylindrical glass jar or bottle, extremely dirty, with indistinguishable inscriptions and ornaments; but when he handed it to Olive, he saw that his search had not been a futile one. There is no explaining how the mere shape and detail of things lost in childhood can startle and stab the emotions; but when she saw the shape of that obsolete pot of paint, with its large stopper and the faded trade mark of decorative fishes upon it, her eyes were stung with tears so that she herself was startled by them. It was as if she had suddenly heard the voice of her father.
“How on earth did you find this?” she cried, in a very contradictory fashion; since she had only intended him to look for it, at the most, in the nearest shop in the nearest town. But that cry alone revealed the subconscious pessimism that had underlain all her archeological affections; she had not believed that any of the dead things that she desired could return. When she saw this one, it crowned and completed that restoration of confidence which she had felt when Herne had rebuked Archer. Both these things somehow rang with reality. All the costumes and ceremonials that had been restored might after all be, as Murrel had suggested, a mere continuation of the play-acting. But Hendry’s Illumination Paints were a real thing; as real as a wooden doll loved in the nursery or lost in the garden. After that moment she never had a doubt about her side in the great debate.
Few indeed, however, in that coloured crowd were likely to share Miss Ashley’s emotions about the parcel. Nobody else could feel the contrast between Monkey being sent out rather like an errand-boy and his coming back like a knight-errant. To the others, now in the full swing of the statelier new fashions, poor Monkey did not look at all like a knight-errant. However much they might vary in the intellectual appreciation of the change, their limbs had grown used to the fall of freer draperies and their eyes to the colours of gayer crowds. They no longer thought so much that their own dress was picturesque; they merely thought that his dress was out of the picture. He was not only a blot on the landscape but a block in the traffic. He patted his horse in an affectionate manner, and that queer prehistoric monster seemed even to make uncouth movements as if returning his affection.
“Odd thing is,” said Archer in his confidential, emphatic style to the young squire who carried the sword, “Odd thing is he can’t see he’s out of it. Always so difficult to manage fellows who can’t see when they’re out of it.”
He relapsed into gloomy silence, and in company with all his associates, settled down to listen rather nervously to a dialogue that had already begun between the newcomer and the potentate on the throne. They had some cause for feeling nervous; sensible as they were of how this preposterous procession out of a three-act farce must have sprawled across the vision of the visionary king. It was all the more alarming when the incongruous Murrel insisted on addressing the throne with a somewhat burlesque civility, but with an apparent pertinacity of intention. He seemed to be appealing to the King-at-Arms, since that person now discharged the functions both of Prime Minister and Lord of the Manor, about the details of his own recent adventures; those wanderings on the borderland of things where he had come upon the ruins of a hansom cab. Archer heard his polite impertinencies gradually linking themselves up into a long soliloquy. He might really have been a traveller telling his travels at the court of some fabled king. But when Archer began to listen a little wearily to what the experiences were, he lost all such romantic illusions about them. Monkey was certainly telling a story; a long story; and a damned silly story, Archer thought.
At first he had gone to a shop. Then he had gone to another shop; or another part of the same shop. Then he had gone to a public-house. So like Monkey to turn up sooner or later at a public-house, and you bet sooner rather than later; as if a gentleman couldn’t have anything he wanted sent quietly to his rooms. Then followed long confusing conversations at the public-house, including an imitation of a superior barmaid; most unsuitable on such an occasion. Then he seemed to have gone for a walk, lord knows where, and talked to a cabman, lord knows why. Then he went to some slum or other in a seaside town and got into trouble with the police. Everybody knew of course that Monkey was fond of practical jokes; but to do him justice, he hadn’t generally bored you with them afterwards, let alone at this length. He seemed to have played a trick on some doctor in charge of some lunatic, so that they didn’t lock up the lunatic but only the doctor. Pity they hadn’t split the difference and locked up Monkey. But what in the world all this had to do with The Movement and the chances of beating Braintree and the Bolshies, Archer would very much like to know. . . . Oh lord, the story was still going on. There seemed to be a girl in it now; and of course that might explain it all, even with a chap like Monkey, who always played at being the wild bachelor. But why in the devil was he pouring it all out now, when they were just going to begin the regular formalities of the Shield and Sword? And why was the King-at-Arms listening in that style, so steady and almost stony? Perhaps he was frozen with rage. Perhaps he had gone to sleep.
Most of the company indeed, including the young man with the sword, were not quite so sensitive as Mr. Archer about the tone, the really right and very best tone, suitable to social occasions. They were not so vexed as was that artist in life at the discord or the Monkey monologue. But they were no more favourably, or at least no more seriously impressed. Some of them began to smile, a few to laugh; though they had a certain air of doing it decorously, as if they were laughing in church. Nobody had the least notion of what Murrel was talking about, or at any rate why he was talking about it. But those who knew him best were a little puzzled by the eager exactitude with which he was telling his long-winded story. And all the time the King-at-Arms sat as motionless as a statue and nobody knew whether he was mortally offended or merely stone deaf.