Grant Allen

“ Dick shrank nervously from their gaze, hardly daring to remember how he had hoped at Chiddingwick to be reckoned in their number. One thing only gave him courage every time he raised his eyes—the Plantagenet leopards on the facade of the buildings. Should he, the descendant of so many great kings—ataris editas regibus—should he slink ashamed from the sons of men whom his ancestors would have treated as rebellious subjects? He refused such degradation. For the honour of the Plantagenets he would still do his best; and more than his best the Black Prince himself could never have accomplished. ”

“ But oh, Archie, it isn't the money Dick and I would care for. Let them take back their wealth—let them take it—if they will! But give us once more our own Plantagenet ancestry!'
Gillespie drew Mary aside for a moment.
'Say nothing to them about it for the present,' he whispered in her ear. 'Let the first keen agony of their regret pass over. I can understand their feeling. This myth had worn itself into the very warp and woof of their natures. It was their one great inheritance. The awakening is a terrible shock to them. ”

“ Though, to be sure, I don't know that anything could make me try much harder than I'd have tried before, for your sake, mother, and for Maud's, and the children's, and the honour of the family.'
'I wish I had your faith, Dick, in the honour of the family,' Mrs. Plantagenet sighed wearily. 'I can't feel it myself. I never could feel it, somehow. Though, of course, it's a good thing if it makes you work and hold your head up in life, and do the best you ever can for Maud and the children. Anything's good that's an incentive to exertion. ”

“ Now, to be a smug is, in Oxford undergraduate circles, the unpardonable sin. It means, to stop in your own rooms and moil and toil, or to lurk and do nothing, while other men in shoals are out and enjoying themselves. It means to avoid the river and the boats; to shun the bump-supper; to decline the wine-party. Sometimes, it is true, the smug is a curmudgeon; but sometimes he is merely a poor and hard-working fellow, the sort of person whom at forty we call a man of ability. ”

“ At the very same moment, indeed, in the cosiest corner of the White Horse parlour, Mr. Plantagenet himself, the head of the house, was observing complacently, in a mellifluous voice, to an eager little group of admiring listeners: 'Yes, gentlemen, my son Richard, I'm proud to say, will shortly begin his career at Oxford University. I'm a poor man myself, I admit; I might have been richer but for untoward events; and circumstances have compelled me to submit in my old age to a degrading profession, for which neither my birth, my education, nor my literary habits have naturally fitted me. ”

“ Sir Bernard gazed hard at him and smiled a mollified smile.
'Oh, you've found that out already, have you?' he murmured dryly. 'Well, you're a very intelligent and well-informed young man: I wouldn't object to you at all for a Secretary of Legation. A secretary, as a rule, is another name for a born fool; they're put there by the F. O. on purpose to annoy one.'
And he smiled a bland smile, and nodded sagely at Gillespie. But no more was said for the moment about a post for Dick Plantagenet. ”

“ Nothing on earth could well have been more unpleasant for poor Dick. He saw at once from Mr. Wells's tone that his father must have bragged: he must have spoken of the projected trip at the White Horse last night, not as a mere speculative journey in search of a problematical and uncertain Scholarship, but as a fait accompli—a domestic arrangement dependent on the mere will of the house of Plantagenet. He must have treated his decision as when a Duke decides that he shall send his son and heir to Christ Church or Trinity. ”

“ Only Maud and Dick were independent in any way; Mrs. Plantagenet and the little ones owed everything to the father. He had been a personage at Chiddingwick, a character in his way, and Chiddingwick for some strange reason had always been proud of him. Even 'carriage company' sent their children to learn of him at the White Horse, just because he was 'old Plantagenet,' and a certain shadowy sentiment attached to his name and personality. Broken reprobate as he was, the halo of past greatness followed him down through life to the lowest depths of degradation and penury. ”

“ The White Horse had stolen away whatever other relics of gentility Mr. Plantagenet possessed, and had reduced him in his latter days to the miserable ruin of what was once a man, and even a man of letters.
It was a sad history, and, alas! a very common one. Thirty years before, when Edmund Plan tagenet, not yet a believer in his own real or pretended royal descent, went up to London from Yorkshire to seek his fortune in literature, he was one of the handsomest and most popular young men in his own society. His name alone succeeded in attracting attention; we are not all of us Plantagenets. ”

“ He had the office routine to learn, and rolls and tallies to decipher, and endless household difficulties of his own to meet, and all the children's schooling and other arrangements to look after, It was still a struggle. But by dint of hard work and pinching, with Maud's able assistance, things came straight in the end somehow. Dick got a pupil or two in his spare time—happier men than himself, who were going up under luckier auspices to Oxford; for, though Dick put the best face upon it, still, it was a pull leaving that beloved University without a degree. ”

“ Plantagenet had vacated. It was a terrible fate, but he saw no way out of it. At one deadly blow all his hopes for the future were dashed utterly to the ground. Much as he hated to think it, he saw at once it was now his imperative duty to go down from Oxford. He must do something-without delay to earn a livelihood somehow for his mother and sisters. He couldn't go on living there in comparative luxury while the rest of his family starved, or declined on the tender mercies of the Chiddingwick workhouse. ”

“ I have learned that Edmund Plantagenet's spirit isn't as wholly dead or as broken as you thought it, and as he thought it, and I'm glad for my own sake, Mr. Gillingham, to have learned it. Good-night, and good-bye to you all, young gentlemen. You won't have the chance to mock an old man's shame again, if I can help it. ”

“ So, when Sir Bernard Gillingham, that mighty man at the Foreign Office, came up on his promised visit to his son at Durham, Gillespie took good care to make the best of the occasion by getting an introduction to him from the Born Poet; and being a person of pleasant manners and graceful address, he soon succeeded in producing a most favourable impression on the mind of the diplomatist. Diplomatists are always immensely struck by a man who can speak the truth and yet be courteous. The last they exact as a sine qua non in life, but the first is a novelty to them. ”

“ Those long mornings in great lecture-rooms, lighted up with dim light from stained-glass windows; those golden afternoons on the gleaming river or among the fields towards Iffey; those strolls round the leafy avenues of Christ Church walks; those loitering moments in Magdalen cloisters! What lounging in a punt under the chestnuts by the Cherwell; what spurts against the stream on the river by Godstow! All, all is delightful to the merest full-blooded boy; to Richard Plantagenet's romantic mind, stored with images of the past, 'twas a perpetual feast of fantastic pleasure. ”

“ He was a son of the people. And as Mary was herself a daughter of the clergy, the eldest girl of a country rector, compelled by the many mouths and the narrow endowment at home to take a place as governess with a more favoured family at Chiddingwick Rectory, she knew she could have no possible right of any sort to take any personal interest in a bookseller's lad, however handsome and yellow-haired and distinguished-looking. ”

“ A certain insane desire to connect his family with the old Royal House of England pursued Dick through life, and made him look upon this purely useless and ornamental object as though it were a matter of the gravest practical importance. Maud felt its gravity, too, quite as much as her brother; it was an almost inevitable result, indeed, of their peculiar upbringing.
Every man has, necessarily, what the French call, well, 'the defects of his qualities'—faults which are either the correlatives or the excess of his particular virtues. ”

“ With an effort, however, he managed to maintain the perpendicular till he reached Folly Bridge; then he turned in at the wicket that leads down from the main road to the little tow-path along the dark and silent bank of the swollen Isis.
But if Edmund Plantagenet's legs were a trifle unsteady, his heart was all afire with wrath and remorse at this dramatic interlude. For the first time in so many years he began to think bitterly to himself of his wasted opportunities and ruined talents. ”

“ Now, Dick had nothing particular to do that afternoon, though he had been bound for the river; but he always liked a stroll with that brilliant Gillingham, whom he had never ceased to admire as a creature from another social sphere—a cross between Lord Byron and the Admirable Crichton. So he put off his row, and walked round to Edward Street, the most fashionable quarter for high-class lodgings to be found in Oxford. ”

“ Even a sober man could hardly have kept his footing on it in so dark a night. 'One false step,' Edmund Plantagenet thought to himself with wild despair, 'and there would be an end of all this fooling. One false step—and splash! A man may slip any day. No suicide in tumbling into a swollen river of a moonless night when the bank's all flooded.'
Still, on and on he walked, having staggered now far, far below Iffley, and away towards the neighbourhood of Sandford lasher. ”

“ Plantagenet for a speech!' Faussett shouted aloud, drumming his glass on the table.
'Hear, hear!' Gillingham cried, echoing the appeal heartily. 'The Plantagenet for a speech! Give us a speech, Mr. Plantagenet!'
Gillingham was a great deal soberer than any of the others, but he was anxious to make notes internally of this singular phenomenon. The human intellect utterly sunk and degraded by wine and debauchery forms a psychological study well worthy the Born Poet's most attentive consideration. ”

“ We can seldom separate the man from the artificial place he holds in our social system. Indeed, the very similarity of their positions in the household—his as tutor and hers as governess—made to some extent now a bond of union between them. Before many weeks were out Mary had begun to look for Dick's pleasant smile of welcome when he arrived in the morning, and to see that the strange young man, whose grave demeanour and conscious self-respect had struck her so markedly that first day at Mr. Wells's, had really after all a great deal in him. ”

“ I have given them the very best education this poor town can afford; and now, though I know it will sadly cripple my slender resources, I mean to make a struggle, my friends, a manful struggle, and send my boy Richard up to Oxford. Richard has brains, undoubted brains; he's proud and reserved, as you all know, and doesn't shine in society; he lacks the proper qualities; but he has undoubted brains, for all that; and brilliancy, I know to my cost'—here he heaved a deep sigh—'is often a pitfall to a man of genius. Richard hasn't genius ”

“ There you have the Nemesis of every false idea, every unreal belief: when once it finally collapses, as collapse it needs must before the searching light of truth, it leaves us for awhile feeble, uncertain, rudderless. So Dick felt that afternoon; so he felt for many a weary week of reconstruction afterwards.
At last they reached home.'Twas a terrible home-coming. As they crept up the steps, poor dispossessed souls, they heard voices within—Mrs. Plantagenet's, and Gillespie's, and the children's, and Mary Tudor's. ”

“ She wondered how Mary could ever be insensible to the romantic charms of such old descent. But there! Mary wasn't a Plantagenet—only a mere Welsh Tudor; and though she was a dear good girl, and as sweet as they're made, how could you expect her to enter fully into the feelings of the real old family? As for Archie Gillespie, he said to Mary more than once:
'Let Dick go his own way, Miss Tudor; it gives him pleasure. He thinks some mysterious good is going to come out of it all for him and his, if he can fill in the missing links in the Plantagenet pedigree. ”

“ His eyes, in fact, were fixed hard on Mary's. A woman knows at once what a man is thinking—especially, of course, when it's herself he's thinking about; and Mary knew that minute the young man with the fine brow and the loose yellow hair was thinking in his own head how exceedingly pretty she was. That makes a girl blush under any circumstances, and all the more so when the man who thinks it is her social inferior. Now, when Mary blushed, she coloured up to her delicate shell-like ears, which made her look prettier and daintier and more charming than ever ”