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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 ma
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 bo
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 begi
Needless to say, most of the people who received these missives were amused; some were a
As already noted, it is rather more than a metaphor to say that the news reached Lord Seawood as a bolt from the blue. The bolt came in a flash out of the blue sky of the summer into the black shadows of the summer-house. It fixed itself in the wall above the Prime Minister’s head; and before Lord Seawood had taken it in, Lord Eden had taken it out. He found attached to it a curled-up document; which the two noblemen proceeded to stare at with somewhat differing degrees of patience. It explained the necessity of a new order of voluntary nobility; and the two involuntary nobles found its exalted aristocratic tone almost terrifying. It stated the tests and trials by which a sterner conception of chivalry could be introduced into the world; though it is only justice to all concerned to say that it did not contain the word Samurai. It explained that an appeal to the ancient virtue of loyalty could alone rally mankind to the restoration of a worthy social order, such as was envisaged by the old orders of knighthood. It explained a great many other things; but from the point of view of the two elderly gentlemen in the summer-house, it did not altogether explain the arrow in the wall.
Lord Eden remained silent; indeed he seemed to be studying the document with more gravity or grim attention than might be expected. But Lord Seawood, after some abrupt ejaculations, turned by a sort of blind instinct to the doorway and the garden from which the thunderbolt had come. And there he saw, away in the middle distance, at the end of the long lawn, something that amazed him as much as a company of angels with haloes and golden wings.
They were a company of people fantastically clad in the garments of five centuries earlier; many of them were holding bows; but what hit Lord Seawood harder than any arrow was the fact that his daughter stood in the front of the whole group, in an outrageous form of attire terminating in two horns like a buffalo; and she wore a broad smile.