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.”
“There seems damned little of it in Miss Ashley and her Troubadour,” said the disappointed amateur. “All spiritual notions and nonsense. I don’t believe he wanted to get married at all.”
“You think he was affected by the Albigensian doctrines?” inquired the librarian, earnestly and almost eagerly. “It is true, of course, that the seat of the heresy was in the south and a great many of the troubadours seemed to have been in that or similar philosophical movements.”
“His movements are philosophical all right,” said Archer. “I like my movements to be a little less philosophical when I’m making love to a girl on the stage. It’s almost as if she really meant him to be shilly-shallying instead of popping the question.”
“The question of avoiding marriage seems to have been essential in the heresy,” said Herne. “I notice that in the records of men returning to orthodoxy after the Crusade of Montford and Dominic, there is the repeated entry iit in matrimonium. It would certainly be interesting to play the part as that of some such semi-oriental pessimist and idealist; a man who feels the flesh to be dishonour to the spirit, even in its most lovable and lawful form. Nothing of that comes out very clearly in the lines Miss Ashley has given me to say; but perhaps your part makes the point a little clearer.”
“I think he’s a long time coming to the point,” replied Archer. “Gives a romantic actor no scope at all.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about any sort of acting,” said the librarian, sadly. “It’s lucky you’ve only given me a few lines in the play.”
He paused a moment, and Julian Archer looked at him with an almost absent-minded pity, as he murmured that it would be all right on the night. For Archer, with all his highly practical savoir faire, was not the man to feel the most subtle changes in the social climate; and he still regarded the librarian more or less as a sort of odd footman or stable-boy brought in by sheer necessity, merely to say, “My lord, the carriage waits.” Preoccupied always by his own practical energies, he took no notice of the man’s maunderings about his own hobby of old books, and was only faintly conscious that the man was maundering still.