Archer sprang up as if he had been named as well as looked at.

  “When a gentleman is accused of blacking boots,” he said, “there is danger of his blacking eyes instead.”

  Braintree took one bony fist out of his pocket.

  “Oh I told you,” he said, “that we reserve the right to strike.”

  “Don’t play the goat, either of you,” insisted the peace-maker, interposing his large red paint-brush, “don’t rampage, Jack. You’ll put your foot in it — in King Richard’s red curtains.”

  Archer retired slowly to his seat again; and his antagonist, after an instant’s hesitation, turned to go out through the open windows.

  “Don’t worry,” he growled, “I won’t make a hole in your canvas. I’m quite content to have made a hole in your caste. What do you want with me? I know you’re really a gentleman; but I like you for all that. But what good has your being a real gentleman or sham gentleman ever done to us? You know as well as I do that men like me are asked to houses like this, and they go there to say a word for their mates; and you are decent to them, and all sorts of beautiful women are decent to them, and everybody’s decent to them; and the time comes when they become just — well, what do you call a man who has a letter to deliver from his friend and is afraid to deliver it?”

  “Yes, but look here,” remonstrated Murrel, “you’ve not only made a hole, but you’ve put me in it. I really can’t get hold of anybody else now. It isn’t to come on for a month; but there’ll be fewer people still then; and we shall probably want that time to rehearse. Why can’t you just do it as a favour? What does it matter what your opinions are? I haven’t got any opinions myself; I used them all up at the Union when I was a boy. But I hate disappointing the ladies; and there really aren’t any other men in the place.”

  Braintree looked at him steadily.

  “Aren’t any other men,” he repeated.

  “Well there’s old Seawood, of course,” said Murrel. “He’s not a bad old chap in his way; and you mustn’t expect me to take as severe a view of him as you do. But I own I can hardly fancy him as a Troubadour. There really and truly aren’t any other men at all.”

  Braintree still looked at him.

  “There is a man in the next room,” he said, “there is a man in the passage; there is a man in the garden; there is a man at the front door; there is a man in the stables; there is a man in the kitchen; there is a man in the cellar. What sort of palace of lies have you built for yourselves, when you see all these round you every day and do not even know that they are men? Why do we strike? Because you forget our very existence when we do not strike. Tell your servants to serve you; but why should I?”

  And he went out into the garden and walked furiously away.

  “Well,” said Archer at last, “I must confess I can’t stand your friend at any price.”

  Murrel stepped back from his canvas and put his head on one side, contemplating it like a connoisseur.

  “I think his idea about the servants is first-rate,” he observed placidly. “Can’t you fancy old Perkins as a Troubadour? You know the butler here, don’t you? Or one of those footmen would Troub like anything.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” said Archer, irritably, “it’s a small part, but he has to do all sorts of things. Why, he has to kiss the princess’s hand.”

  “The butler would do it like a Zephyr,” replied Murrel, “but perhaps we ought to look lower in the hierarchy. If he won’t do it I will ask the footmen, and if they won’t I will ask the groom, and if he won’t I will ask the stable-boy, and if he won’t I will ask the knife-boy, and if he won’t I will ask whatever is lower and viler than a knife-boy. And if that fails I will go lower still, and ask the librarian. Why, of course! The very thing! The librarian!”

  And with sudden impetuosity he slung his heavy paint-brush to the other side of the room and ran out into the garden, followed by the wondering Mr. Archer.

  It was quite early in the morning; for the amateurs had risen some time before breakfast to act or paint; and Braintree always rose early, to write and send off a rigorous, not to say rabid, leading article for a Labour evening paper. The white light still had that pale pink tinge in corners and edges which must have caused the poet, somewhat fantastically, to equip the daybreak with fingers. The house stood high upon a lift of land that sank on two sides towards the Severn. The terraced garden, fringed with knots of tapering trees carrying white clouds of the spring blossom, with large flower-beds flung out in a scheme like heraldry, at once strict and gay, scarcely veiled, and did not confuse, the colossal curve of the landscape. Along its lines the clouds rolled up and lifted like cannon smoke, as if the sun were silently storming the high places of the earth. Wind and sun burnished the slanting grass; and they seemed to stand on the shining shoulder of the world. At a high angle, but as if by accident, stood a pedestal’d grey fragment from the ruins of the old abbey which had once stood on that site. Beyond was the corner of an older wing of the house towards which Murrel was making his way. Archer had the theatrical sort of good looks, as well as the theatrical sort of fine clothes, which is effective in such natural pageantry; and the picturesque illusion was clinched by a figure as quaintly clad which came out into the sunshine a few moments after. It was a young lady with a royal crown and red hair that looked almost as royal, for she habitually carried her head with something of haughtiness as well as health; and seemed to snuff up the breeze like the war-horse in scripture; to rejoice in her robes as they swept with the sweeping wind and land. Julian Archer in his close-fitting suit of three colours made up an excellent picture; beside which the modern colours of Murrel’s tweeds and tie looked as common as those of the stablemen among whom he was in the habit of lounging.

  Rosamund Severne, Lord Seawood’s only daughter, was of the type that throws itself into things; and makes a splash. Her great beauty was of the exuberant sort, like her good-nature and good spirits; and she thoroughly enjoyed being a medieval princess — in a play. But she had none of the reactionary dreaminess of her friend and guest Miss Ashley. On the contrary, she was very up-to-date and exceedingly practical. Though finally frustrated by the conservatism of her father, she had early made an attempt to become a lady doctor; but had settled down into being a lady bountiful, of a boisterous kind. She had once also been very prominent on platforms and in political work; but whether to get women votes, or prevent their getting them, her friends could never remember.

  Seeing Archer afar off, she called out in her ringing and resolute fashion: “I was looking for you; don’t you think we ought to go through that scene again?”

  “And I was looking for you,” interrupted Murrel, “still more dramatic developments in the dramatic world. I say, do you know your own librarian by sight, by any chance?”

  “What on earth have librarians got to do with it?” asked Rosamund in her matter-of-fact way. “Yes, of course, I know him. I don’t think anybody knows him very well.”

  “Sort of book-worm, I suppose,” observed Archer.

  “Well, we’re all worms,” remarked Murrel cheerfully, “I suppose a book-worm shows a rather refined and superior taste in diet. But, look here, I rather want to catch that worm, like the early bird. I say, Rosamund, do be an early bird and catch him for me.”

  “Well, I am rather an early bird this morning,” she replied, “quite a skylark.”

  “And quite ready for skylarking, I suppose,” said Murrel. “But really, I’m quite serious; I mean dost thou despise the earth where cares abound; that is do you know the library where books abound, and can you bring me a real live librarian?”

  “I believe he’s in there now,” said Rosamund with some wonder. “You’ve only got to go in and speak to him; though I can’t imagine what you want.”

  “You always go to the point,” said Murrel, “straight from the shoulder; true to the kindred points of heaven and home; you’re the right sort of bird, you are.”

  “A bird of paradise,” said Mr. Archer gracefully.

  “I’m afraid you’re a mocking bird,” she answered laughing, “and we all know that Monkey is a goose.”

  “I am a worm and a goose and a monkey,” assented Murrel. “My evolution never stops; but before I turn into something else let me explain. Archer, with his infernal aristocratic pride, won’t allow the knife-boy to act as Troubadour, so I’m falling back on the librarian. I don’t know his name, but we simply must get somebody.”

  “His name is Herne,” answered the young lady a little doubtfully. “Don’t go and — I mean he’s a gentleman and all that; I believe he’s quite a learned man.”

  But Murrel had already darted on in his impetuous fashion and disappeared round a corner of the house towards the glass doors leading into the library. But even as he turned the corner he stopped suddenly and stared at something in the middle distance. On the ridge of the high garden, where it fell away into the lower grounds, dark against the morning sky, stood two figures; the very last he would ever have expected to see standing together. One was John Braintree, that deplorable demagogue. The other was Olive Ashley. Even as he looked, it is true, Olive turned away with what looked like a gesture of anger or repudiation. But it seemed to Murrel much more extraordinary that they should have met than that they should have parted. A rather puzzled look appeared on his melancholy monkey face for a moment; then he turned and stepped lightly into the library.

  CHAPTER III

  THE LADDER IN THE LIBRARY

  The librarian at Seawood had once had his name in the papers; though he was probably unaware of the fact. It was during the great Camel Controversy of 1906, when Professor Otto Elk, that devastating Hebrew scholar, was conducting his great and gallant campaign against the Book of Deuteronomy; and had availed himself of the obscure librarian’s peculiar intimacy with the Palaeo-Hittites. The learned reader is warned that these were no vulgar Hittites; but a yet more remote race covered by the same name. He really knew a prodigious amount about these Hittites, but only, as he would carefully explain, from the unification of the kingdom by Pan-El-Zaga (popularly and foolishly called Pan-Ul-Zaga) to the disastrous battle of Uli-Zamul, after which the true Palaeo-Hittite civilisation, of course, can hardly be said to have continued. In his case it can be said seriously that nobody knew how much he knew. He had never written a book upon his Hittites; if he had it would have been a library. But nobody could have reviewed it but himself.

  In the public controversy his appearance and disappearance were equally isolated and odd. It seems that there existed a system or alphabet of Hittite hieroglyphics, which were different from all other hieroglyphics, which, indeed, to the careless eye of the cold world, did not appear to be hieroglyphics at all, but irregular surfaces of partially decayed stone. But as the Bible said somewhere that somebody drove away forty-seven camels, Professor Elk was able to spread the great and glad news that in the Hittite account of what was evidently the same incident, the researches of the learned Herne had already deciphered a distinct allusion to only forty camels; a discovery which gravely affected the foundations of Christian cosmology and seemed to many to open alarming and promising vistas in the matter of the institution of marriage. The librarian’s name became quite current in journalism for a time, and insistence on the persecution or neglect suffered at the hands of the orthodox by Galileo, Bruno, and Herne, became an agreeable variation on the recognised triad of Galileo, Bruno, and Darwin. Neglect, indeed, there may in a manner have been; for the librarian of Seawood continued laboriously to spell out his hieroglyphics without assistance; and had already discovered the words “forty camels” to be followed by the words “and seven.” But there was nothing in such a detail to lead an advancing world to turn aside or meddle with the musty occupations of a solitary student.

  The librarian was certainly of the sort that is remote from the daylight, and suited to be a shade among the shades of a great library. His figure was long and lithe, but he held one shoulder habitually a little higher than the other; his hair was of a dusty lightness. His face was lean and his lineaments long and straight; but his wan blue eyes were a shade wider apart than other men’s; increasing an effect of having one eye off. It was indeed rather a weird effect, as if his eye were somewhere else; not in the mere sense of looking elsewhere, but almost as if it were in some other head than his own. And indeed, in a manner, it was; it was in the head of a Hittite ten thousand years ago.

  For there was something in Michael Herne which is perhaps in every specialist, buried under his mountains of material and alone enabling him to support them; something of what, when it gains vent in an upper air, is called poetry. He instinctively made pictures of the things he studied. Even discerning men, appreciative of many corners of history, would have seen in him only a dusty antiquarian, fumbling with pre-historic pots and pans or the everlasting stone hatchet; a hatchet that most of us are very willing to bury. But they would have done him an injustice. Shapeless as they were, these things to him were not idols, but instruments. When he looked at the Hittite hatchet he did imagine it as killing something for the Hittite pot; when he looked at the pot he did see it boiling, to cook something killed with the hatchet. He would not have called it “something,” of course; but given the name of some sufficiently edible bird or beast; he was quite capable of making out a Hittite menu. From such faint fragments he had indeed erected a visionary and archaic city and state, eclipsing Assyria in its elephantine and unshapely enormity. His soul was afar off, walking under strange skies of turquoise and gold; amid head-dresses like high sepulchres and sepulchres higher than citadels; and beards braided as if into figured tapestries. When he looked out of the open library window at the gardener sweeping the trim garden walks of Seawood, it was not these things that he saw. He saw those huge enthroned brutes and birds that seemed to be hewn out of mountains. He saw those vast, overpowering faces, that seemed to have been planned like cities. There were even hints that he had allowed the Hittites to prey upon his mind to its slight unsettlement. A story was current of an incautious professor who had repeated idle gossip against the moral character of the Hittite princess, Pal-Ul-Gazil, and whom the librarian had belaboured with the long broom used for dusting the books and driven to take refuge on the top of the library steps. But opinion was divided as to whether this story was founded on fact or on Mr. Douglas Murrel.

  Anyhow, the anecdote was at least an allegory. Few realise how much of controversial war and tumult can be covered by an obscure hobby. The fighting spirit has almost taken refuge in hobbies as in holes and corners of the earth; and left the larger public fields singularly dull and flat and free from real debate. It might be imagined that the Daily Wire was a slashing paper and the Review of Assyrian Excavation was a mild and peaceful one. But in truth it is the other way. It is the popular paper that has become cold and conventional, and full of clichés used without any conviction. It is the scholarly paper that is full of fire and fanaticism and rivalry. Mr. Herne could not contain himself when he thought of Professor Poole and his preposterous and monstrous suggestion about the Pre-Hittite sandal. He pursued the Professor, if not with a broom at least with a pen brandished like a weapon; and expended on these unheard-of questions energies of real eloquence, logic and living enthusiasm which the world will never hear of either. And when he discovered fresh facts, exposed accepted fallacies or concentrated on contradictions which he exposed with glaring lucidity, he was not an inch nearer to any public recognition but he was something which public men cannot invariably claim to be. He was happy.

  For the rest, he was the son of a poor parson; he was one of the few who have succeeded in being unsociable at Oxford, not from positive dislike of society but from an equally positive love of solitude; and his few but persistent bodily exercises were either solitary like walking and swimming, or rather rare and eccentric, like fencing. He had a very good general knowledge of books and, having to earn his own living, was very glad to earn a salary by looking after the fine old library collected by the previous owners of Seawood Abbey. But the one holiday of his life had been full of hard work, when he went as a minor assistant in the excavations of Hittite cities in Arabia; and all his day-dreams were but repetitions of that holiday.

  He was standing at the open French windows by which the library looked on to the lawn, with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, and the rather blind look of introspection in his eyes when the green line of the garden was broken by the apparition of three figures, two of whom at least might have been considered striking, not to say startling. They might have been gaily coloured ghosts, come out of the past. Their costume was far from being Hittite, as even a humbler grade of specialism might well have perceived; but it was almost as outlandish. Only the third figure, in a light tweed jacket and trousers was of a reassuring modernity.

  “Oh, Mr. Herne,” a young lady was saying to him in courteous but rather confident tones; a young lady framed in a marvellous horned head-dress and a tight blue robe with hanging pointed sleeves. “We want to ask you a great favour. We are in no end of a difficulty.”

  Mr. Herne’s eyes seemed to alter their focus, as if fitted with a new lens, to lose the distance and take in the foreground; a foreground that was filled with the magnificent young lady. It seemed to have a curious effect on him, for he was dumb for a moment, and then said with more warmth than might have been expected from the look of him.

  “Anything whatever that I can do . . .”

  “It’s only to take a tiny little part in our play,” she pleaded, “it’s a shame to give you such a small one, but everybody has fallen through and we don’t want to give up the whole thing.”

  “What play is it?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s all nonsense, of course,” she said easily, “it’s called ‘Blondel the Troubadour,’ about Richard Coeur de Lion and serenades and princesses and castles and the usual sort of thing. But we want somebody for the Second Troubadour, who has to go about with Blondel and talk to him. Or rather be talked to, for, of course, Blondel does all the talking. It wouldn’t take you long to learn your part.” “Just twanging the light guitar,” said Murrel encouragingly, “sort of medieval variant of playing on the old banjo.”