The Return of Don Quixote

“My dear girl,” replied Murrel quietly, “don’t you see yet what that means? Braintree can knock all your heads off at that sort of discussion. He’s got ten times more idea of why he thinks what he does think than most of what you call cultured people. He’s read quite as much and remembers much more of what he’s read. And he has got some tests of whether it’s true or not, which he can instantly apply. The tests may be quite wrong, but he can apply them and produce the result at once. Don’t you ever feel how vague we all are?”

“Yes,” she replied in a less tart accent, “he does know his own mind.”

“It’s true he doesn’t know enough about some sorts of people’s minds,” went on Murrel, “but he knows our sort better than some; and did you really expect him to be prostrated before the mind of old Wister? No, no, my dear Olive, if you really want to see him prostrated, or anybody prostrated, you must come with me this evening to the Pig and Whistle–”

“I don’t want to see anybody prostrated,” she replied, “and I think it was very wrong of you to take him to such low places.”

“And what about me?” asked the gentleman plaintively, “What about my morals? Is my moral training of no importance? Is my immortal soul of no value? Why this levity and indifference to my spiritual prospects at the Pig and Whistle?”

“Oh,” she replied with elaborate indifference “everybody knows you don’t mind that sort of thing.”

“I raise against the Red Tie the more truly democratic blazon of the Red Nose; and appeal from the Marseillaise to the Music Hall,” he said, smiling. “Don’t you think now that if I went hunting for the Red Nose through London, rejecting the pink, the purple, the merely russet, the too dusky crimson, and so on, I might find at last a nose of that delicate fourteenth century tint which–”

“If you can find the paint,” retorted Olive, “I don’t care whose nose you paint with it. But I’d prefer Mr. Archer’s.”

It is necessary that the long-suffering reader should know something of the central incident in the play called “Blondel the Troubadour,” as that alone could have rendered possible or credible the central incident in the story called, “The Return of Don Quixote.” In this drama, Blondel leaves his lady-love in a somewhat u

The climax was not a bad piece of amateur drama. When Blondel the Troubadour has at last discovered the castle that contains his master, and has collected (somewhat improbably) a company of courtiers, court ladies, heralds and the like in the depths of the Austrian forest outside the doors of that dungeon, to receive the royal captive with loyal acclamations, King Richard comes out with a flourish of trumpets, takes the centre of the stage, and there before all his peripatetic court, with exceedingly royal gestures, abdicates his royal throne. He declares that he will be a king no longer, but only a knight errant. He had indeed been sufficiently errant in every sense, when his misfortune fell upon him; but it has not cured him of his own version of the view that it is human to err. He had been wandering in those Central European forests, falling into various adventures by the way, when he finally fell into the misadventure of the Austrian captivity. He now declared that these nameless meanderings, despite their conclusion, had been the happiest hours of his life. He delivers a withering denunciation of the wickedness of the other kings and princes of his time and the disgusting condition of political affairs generally. Miss Olive Ashley had quite a pretty talent for imitating the more turgid Elizabethan blank verse. He expresses a preference for the personal society of snakes to that of Phillip Augustus, the King of France; compares the wild boar of the forests favourably with statesmen managing public affairs at the moment; and makes a speech of a hearty and hospitable sort, addressed chiefly to the wolves and winter winds, begging them to make themselves comfortable at his expense, so long as he is not required to meet any of his relatives or recent political advisers. With a peroration ending with a rhymed couplet, in the Shakespearean ma

Such was the play of “Blondel the Troubadour,” not altogether a bad specimen of the sentimental and old-fashioned romance, popular before the war, but now only remembered because of the romantic results which it afterwards produced in real life. While the rest were occupied in their respective ways with acting or scenery, two other figures in that human drama remained loyal to other enthusiasms, not without effect on their future. Olive Ashley continued to potter about impenitently with paints and pictured missals from the library. And Michael Herne continued to devour volume after volume about the history, philosophy, theology, ethics and economics of the four medieval centuries, in the hope of fitting himself to deliver the fifteen lines of blank verse allotted by Miss Ashley to the Second Troubadour.

It is only fair to say, however, that Archer was quite as industrious in his way as Herne in another. As they were the Two Troubadours they often found themselves studying side by side.

“It seems to me,” said Julian Archer one day, flinging down the manuscript with which he had refreshed his memory, “that this fellow Blondel as a lover is a bit of a fraud. I like to put a bit more passion into it myself.”

“Certainly there was something curiously abstract, and at first sight artificial, about all that Provencal etiquette,” assented the Second Troubadour, otherwise Mr. Herne. “The Courts of Love seem to have been pedantic, almost pettifogging. Sometimes it did not seem to matter whether the lover had seen the lady at all; as with Rudel and the Princess of Tripoli. Sometimes it was a courtly bow to the wife of your liege lord, a worship open and tolerated. But I suppose there was often real passion as well.”