There & Back Part 14

Was he not "the author of her being"? If he did not quite imagine he had created her, he certainly never thought of any one but himself as having to do with her existence. All the credit in it was his! He forgot even what share her mother might claim; not to mention what in her might belong to the Sum of Things, the insensate Pan. A self-glorious man is the biggest fool in the world.

Her mother, too, was proud of her--loved her indeed after a careless fas.h.i.+on--was even in a sort obliged to her for having come to her. But she did not care for her enough to interfere with her. Notwithstanding the mother's coa.r.s.eness, her outbursts of temper, her intolerance of opposition, she and her daughter had never yet come into collision. The reason did not entirely lie in the sweetness of the daughter, but partly in the fact that the mother had two children besides, one of whom she loved far more, and the other far less.

Barbara had no pride. She spoke in the same tone to lord and tradesman.

She had been the champion of the blacks in her own country, and in England looked lovingly on the gypsies in their little tents on the windy downs.

CHAPTER XVI. _BARBARA AND RICHARD_.

Hardly had Lestrange left the room, when Barbara entered, noiseless as a moth, which creature she somehow resembled at times: one observant friend came to see that she resembled all swift, gay, and gentle creatures in turn. She was in the same green dress which had favoured her concealment in the beech, and in which Richard had seen her afterward at the breakfast-table, but of which he had not since caught a glimmer. Her blue eyes--at times they seemed black, but they were blue--settled upon Richard the moment she entered, and resting on him seemed to lead her up to the table where he was at work.

"What have you done to make Arthur so angry?" she said, her manner as if they had known each other all their lives.

"What I am doing now, miss--making this book last a hundred years longer."

"Why should you, if he doesn't want you to do it? The book is his!"

"He will be pleased enough by and by. It's only that he thinks I can't, and is afraid I shall ruin it."

"Hadn't you better leave it then?"

"That would be to ruin it. I have gone too far for that."

"Why should you want to make it last so long? They are always printing books over again, and a new book is much nicer than an old one."

"So some people think; but others would much rather read a book in its first shape. And then books get so changed by printers and editors, that it is absolutely necessary to have copies of them as they were at first.

You see this little book, miss? It don't look much, does it?"

"It looks miserable--and so dirty!"

"By the time I have done with it, it will be worth fifty, perhaps a hundred pounds--I don't know exactly. It is a play of Shakespeare's us published in his lifetime."

"But they print better and more correctly now, don't they?"

"Yes; but us I said, they often change things."

"How is that?"

"Sometimes they will change a word, thinking it ought to be another; sometimes they will alter a pa.s.sage because they do not understand it, putting it all wrong, and throwing aside a great meaning for a small one: the change of a letter may alter the whole idea. But they often do it just by blundering. Shall I tell you an instance that came to my knowledge yesterday? It is but a trifle, yet is worth telling.--Of course you know the _Idylls of the King_?"

"No, I don't Why do you say 'of course'?"

"Because I thought every English lady read Tennyson."

"Ah, but I was born in New Zealand!--Tell me the blunder, though."

"There was one thing in _The Pausing of Arthur_--that's the name of one of the Idylls--which I never could understand:--how sir Bedivere could throw a sword with both hands, and make it go in the way Tennyson says it went."

"But who was sir Bedivere?"

"You must read the poem to know that, Miss. He was one of the knights of king Arthur's Round Table."

"I don't know anything about king Arthur."

"I will repeat us much of the poem as is necessary to make you understand about the misprint."

"_Do--please_."

"Then quickly rose sir Bedivere, and ran, And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged Among the bulrush beds, and clutch'd the sword, And strongly wheeled and threw it. The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flas.h.i.+ng round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea.

So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur."

"What does _the brand Excalibur_--is that it?--what does it mean? They put a brand on the cattle in the bush."

"_Brand_ means a sword, and _Excalibur_ was the name of this sword. They seem to have baptized their swords in those days!"

"There's nothing about _both hands_!"

"True; that comes a little lower down, where sir Bedivere tells king Arthur what he has done. He says--

"'Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him'.

"--Now do you think anybody could do that, and make it go flas.h.i.+ng round and round in an arch?"

Barbara thought for a moment, then said--

"No, certainly not. To make it go like that, you would have to take it in one hand, and swing it round your head--and then you couldn't without a string tied to it. Or perhaps it was a sabre, and he was so strong he could send it like a boomerang!"

"No; it was a straight, big, heavy sword.--How then do you think Tennyson came to describe the thing so?"

"Because he didn't know better--or didn't think enough about it."

"There is more than that in it, I fancy: he was misled by a printer's blunder, I suspect. Some months ago I found the pa.s.sage which Tennyson seems to follow, in a cheap reprint of sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur--then just out, and could not make sense of it. Yesterday I found here this long little book, evidently the edition from which the other was printed--and printed correctly too. In both issues, this is what the knight is made to say:

"'Then sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up and went to the water's side, and there he bound the girdle about the belts. And then he threw the sword into the water as far as he might.'"

"Well," said Barbara, "you have not made me any wiser! You said the new one was printed correctly from that old one!"

"But I did not say the old one, as you call it, was itself printed correctly from the much older one! Look here now," continued Richard--and mounting the library-steps, he took down another small volume, very like the former, "--here is another edition, of nearly the same date: let me read what is printed there:--

"'Then sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water side, and there he bound the girdle about the hilt. And then he threw the sword into the water as far as he might.'

"Now, most likely the copy from which both of these editions were printed, had the word _hilts_, for then they always spoke of the _hilts_, not _hilt_ of a sword; and the one printer modernized it into _hilt_, and the other, perhaps mistaking the dim print, for _hilts_ printed _belts_. To tie the girdle about the _belts_ must simply be nonsense. But to tie the girdle to the hilts of the sword, would just give the knight what you said he would want--something long to swing it round his head with, and throw it like a stone, and the sling with it."

"I understand."

"You see then how the printer's blunder, which might not appear to matter much, has come to matter a great deal, for it has, it seems to me, caused a fault-spot in the loveliest poem!"