by Grant Allen
Maud sat down and ate her supper. She was a pretty girl, very slender and delicate, with a fair pink-and-white skin, and curious flashing eyes, most unusual in a blonde, though she was perhaps just a shade less handsome and distinguished-looking than the Heir Apparent.
All through the meal little else was talked of than this projected revolution, Dick’s great undertaking. The boys were most full of it. ‘Our Dick at Oxford! It was ripping — simply ripping! A lark of the first dimensions!’ Clarence made up his mind at once to go up and see Dick his very first term, in oak-panelled rooms at Durham College. They must be oak-panelled. While Harry, who had feasted on ‘Verdant Green’ for weeks, was anxious to know what sort of gown he’d have to wear, and whether he thought he’d have ample opportunities for fighting the proctors.
’Twas a foregone conclusion. So innocently did they all discount ‘Our Dick’s’ success, and so firmly did they believe that whatever he attempted he was certain to succeed in!
After supper Mr. Plantagenet rose with an important air, and unhooked his hat very deliberately from its peg. His wife and Dick and Maud all cried out with one voice:
‘Why, surely you’re not going out to-night, father!’
For to go out, they knew well, in Mr. Planta-genet’s dialect, meant to spend the evening in the White Horse parlour.
‘Yes, my dear,’ Mr. Plantagenet answered, in his blandest tone, turning round to his wife with apologetic suavity. ‘The fact is, I have a very particular engagement this evening. No, no, Dick, my boy; don’t try to detain me. Gentlemen are waiting for me. The claims of social life, my dear son — so much engaged — my sole time for the world — my one hour of recreation! Besides, strangers have been specially invited to meet me — people who have heard of my literary reputation! ’Twould be churlish to disappoint them.’
And, brushing his son aside, Mr. Plantagenet stuck his hat on jauntily just a trifle askew, with ponderous airiness, and strolled down the steps as he adjusted his Inverness cape on his ample shoulders, with the air of a gentleman seeking his club, with his martial cloak around him.
For in point of fact it had occurred to Mr. Plantagenet as they sat at supper that, if he burst in upon the White Horse as the first bearer of such novel and important gossip — how his son Richard was shortly going to enter as an undergraduate at Durham College, Oxford — not only would he gain for himself great honour and glory, but also some sympathizing friend, proud to possess the privilege of acquaintance with so distinguished a family, would doubtless mark his sense of the dignity of the occasion by offering its head the trifling hospitality of a brandy-and-soda. And since brandy-and-soda formed the mainspring of Mr. Plantagenet’s scheme of being, so noble an opportunity for fulfilling the end and aim of his existence, he felt sure, was not to be lightly neglected.
He strolled out, all smiles, apologetic, but peremptory. As soon as he was gone, the three remaining elders glanced hard at one another with blank surmise in their eyes; but they said nothing openly. Only, in his heart, Richard blamed himself with bitter blame for his unwonted indiscretion in blurting out the whole truth. He knew that by ten to-morrow morning all the world of Chidding-wick would have heard of his projected little trip to Oxford.
When the younger ones were gone to bed, the three still held their peace and only looked at each other. Mutual shame prevented them from ever outwardly commenting on the father’s weaknesses. Maud was the first to break the long deep silence.
‘After this, Dick,’ she said decisively, ‘there’s no other way out of it. You’ve burnt your boats. If you kill yourself to do it, you must win that Scholarship!’
‘I must,’ Dick answered firmly. ‘And what’s more, I will. I’ll get it or die for it. I could never stand the disgrace, now, of coming back empty-handed to Chiddingwick without it.’
‘Perhaps,’ Mrs. Plantagenet suggested, speaking boldly out the thought that lurked in all their minds, ‘he won’t say a word of it.’
Maud and Dick looked up at her with incredulous amazement. ‘Oh, mother!’ was all they could say. They knew their father’s moods too well by far to buoy themselves up with such impossible expectations.
‘Well, it seals the business, anyhow,’ Dick went on, after a moment’s pause. ‘I must get it now, that’s simply certain. 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. Yet I often wish, when I see how hard you both have to toil and moil, with the music and all that, we didn’t belong to the royal stock at all, but to the other Plantagenets, who left the money.’
Both Richard and Maud exclaimed with one accord at these painful words: ‘Oh, don’t, dear mother!’ To them, her speech sounded like sheer desecration. Faith in their own unsullied Plan-tagenet blood was for both a religion. And, indeed, no wonder. It had spurred them on to all that was highest and best within them. To give up that magnificent heritage of princely descent for mere filthy lucre would have seemed to either an unspeakable degradation. They loved their mother dearly; yet they often reflected, in a vague, half-unconscious sort of undercurrent of thought, that after all she was not herself a born Plantagenet, as they were; she had only married into the family, and couldn’t be expected to feel quite as they did on so domestic a matter. It never struck either of them that in point of fact all those better qualities in themselves which made them so jealous for the honour of the family had descended to them solely from their mother’s side of the house, and were altogether alien to the lower nature of that good-humoured, idle, unprincipled scamp and ne’er-do-well, their father.
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. But I trust I have, at least, been a good father to my children. A good — father — to my children. 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; but he’s industrious and plodding, and possesses, I’m told, a remarkable acquaintance with the history of his country. So I’ve made up my mind to brave the effort and send him up to our ancestral University. He may do something in time to repair the broken fortunes of a respectable family. Gentlemen,’ Mr. Plantagenet went on, glancing round him for confirmation of his coming statement, ‘I think you’ll all bear me witness that I’ve never boasted or bragged about my family in any way; but you’ll all admit, too, that my family is a respectable one, and that the name I bear has not been wholly undistinguished in the history of this country. — Thank you, sir; I’m very much obliged indeed to you for your kindness; I don’t mind if I do. — Brandy, if you please, as usual, Miss Brooks — and a split soda. — Gentlemen, I thank you for your generous sympathy. Misfortune has not wholly deprived me, I’m proud to notice, of appreciative friends
. I will drain this sparkling beaker, which my neighbour is good enough to offer, to an appropriate toast — the toast of Success to Richard Plantagenet of Durham College, Oxford.’
CHAPTER IV. A ROYAL POURPARLER.
Next morning, when Richard went down to his work in town, Mr. Wells, his employer, accosted him at once with the unwelcome greeting:
‘Hullo, Plantagenet, so I hear you’re going up to college at Oxford!’
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.
This mode of envisaging the subject was doubly annoying to Dick, for not only would he feel most keenly the disgrace of returning empty-handed if he failed in the examination, but relations might perhaps become strained meanwhile between himself and Mr. Wells, if the employer thought he might at any moment be deprived of the assistant’s services. However, we must all answer for the sins of our fathers: there was nothing for it now but to brazen it out as best he might; so Dick at once confided to his master the true state of the case, explaining that he would only want a few days’ holiday, during which he engaged to supply an efficient substitute; that his going to Oxford permanently must depend on his success in the Scholarship examination; and that even if he succeeded — which he modestly judged unlikely — he wouldn’t need to give up his present engagement and go into residence at the University till October.
These explanations, frankly given with manly candour, had the good effect of visibly mollifying Mr. Wells’s nascent and half-unspoken resentment. Richard had noticed just at first that he assumed a sarcastic and somewhat aggrieved tone, as one who might have expected to be the first person informed of this intended new departure. But as soon as all was satisfactorily cleared up, the bookseller’s manner changed immediately, and he displayed instead a genuine interest in the success of the great undertaking. To say the truth, Mr. Wells was not a little proud of his unique assistant. He regarded him with respect, not unmixed with pity.
All Chiddingwick, indeed, took a certain compassionate interest in the Plantagenet family. They were, so to speak, public property and local celebrities. Lady Agatha Moore herself, the wife of the Squire, and an Earl’s daughter, always asked Mrs. Plantagenet to her annual garden-party. Chiddingwickians pointed out the head of the house to strangers, and observed with pardonable possessive pride: ‘That’s our poor old dancing-master; he’s a Plantagenet born, and some people say if it hadn’t been for those unfortunate Wars of the Roses he’d have been King of England. But now he holds classes at the White Horse Assembly Rooms.’
Much more then had Mr. Wells special reason to be proud of his own personal relations with the heir of the house, the final inheritor of so much shadowy and hypothetical splendour. The moment he learned the real nature of Dick Plantagenet’s errand, he was kindness itself to his clever assistant. He desired to give Dick every indulgence in his power. Mind the shop? No, certainly not! Richard would want all his time now to cram for the examination. He must cram, cram, cram; there was nothing like cramming!
Mr. Wells, laudably desirous of keeping well abreast with the educational movement of the present day, laid immense stress upon this absolute necessity for cram in the modern world. He even advised Richard to learn by heart the names and dates of all the English monarchs Dick could hardly forbear a smile at this naïve but well-meant proposal. He had worked hard at Modern History, both British and continental, in all his spare time, ever since he left the grammar school, and few men at the University knew as much as he did of our mediaeval annals. We are all for ‘epochs’ nowadays; and Dick’s epoch was the earlier middle age of feudalism. But the notion that anything so childish as the names and dates of kings could serve his purpose tickled his gravity not a little. Still, the advice was kindly meant, up to Mr. Wells’s lights, and Dick received it with grave courtesy, making answer politely that all these details were already familiar to him.
During the four days that remained before the trip to Oxford, Mr. Wells wouldn’t hear of Richard’s doing any more work in the shop than was absolutely necessary. He must spend all his time, the good man said, in reading Hume and Smollett — the latest historical authorities of whom the Chiddingwick bookseller had any personal knowledge. Dick availed himself for the most part of his employer’s kindness; but there was one piece of work, he said, which he couldn’t neglect, no matter what happened. It was a certain bookbinding job of no very great import — just a couple of volumes to cover in half-calf for the governess at the Rectory. Yet he insisted upon doing it.
Somehow, though he had only seen Mary Tudor once, for those few minutes in the shop, he attached a very singular and sentimental importance to binding that book for her. She was a pretty girl, for one thing — an extremely pretty girl — and he admired her intensely. But that wasn’t all; she was a Tudor, as well, and he was a Plan-tagenet. In some vague, half-conscious way he reflected more than once that ‘it had gone with a Tudor, and with a Tudor it might come back again.’ What he meant by that it he hardly knew himself. Certainly not the crown of this United Kingdom; for Dick was far too good a student of constitutional history not to be thoroughly aware that the crown of England itself was elective, not hereditary; and he had far too much common-sense to suppose for one moment that the people of these three realms would desire to disturb the Act of Settlement and repeal the Union in order to place a local dancing-master or a bookseller’s assistant on the throne of England — for to Scotland he hadn’t even the shadowy claim of an outside pretender. As he put it himself, ‘We were fairly beaten out of there once for all by the Bruce, and had never at the best of times any claim to speak of.’ No; what he meant by It was rather some dim past greatness of the Plantagenet family, which the bookseller’s lad hoped to win back to some small extent in the noblest and best of all ways — by deserving it.
The days wore away; Stubbs and Freeman were well thumbed; the two books for Mary Tudor were bound in the daintiest fashion known to Chiddingwickian art, and on the morning of the eventful Wednesday itself, when he was first to try his fate at Oxford, Dick took them up in person, neatly wrapped in white tissue-paper, to the door of the Rectory.
Half-way up the garden-path Mary met him by accident. She was walking in the grounds with one of the younger children; and Dick, whose quick imagination had built up already a curious castle in the air, felt half shocked to find that a future Queen of England, Wales, and Ireland (de jure) should be set to take care of the Rector’s babies. However, he forgot his indignation when Mary, recognising him, advanced with a pleasant smile — her smile was always considered the prettiest thing about her — and said in a tone as if addressed to an equal:
‘Oh, you’ve brought back my books, have you? That’s punctuality itself. Don’t mind taking them to the door. How much are they, please? I’ll pay at once for them.’
Now, this was a trifle disconcerting to Dick, who had reasons of his own for not wishing her to open the parcel before him. Still, as there was no way out of it, he answered in a somewhat shamefaced and embarrassed voice: ‘It comes to three-and-sixpence.’
Mary had opened the packet meanwhile, and glanced hastily at the covers. She saw in a second that the bookseller’s lad had exceeded her instructions. For the books were bound in full calf, very dainty and delicate, and on the front cover of each was stamped in excellent workmanship a Tudor rose, with the initials M. T. intertwined in a neat little monogram beneath it. She looked at them for a moment with blank dismay in her eye, thinking just at first what a lot he must be going to charge her for it; then, as he named the price, a flush of shame rose of a sudden to he
r soft round cheek.
‘Oh no,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It must be more than that. You couldn’t possibly bind them so for only three-and-sixpence!’
‘Yes, I did,’ Dick answered, now as crimson as herself. ‘You’ll find the bill inside. Mr. Wells wrote it out. There’s no error at all. You’ll see it’s what I tell you.’
Mary fingered her well-worn purse with uncertain fingers.
‘Surely,’ she said again, ‘you’ve done it all in calf. Mr. Wells can’t have known exactly how you were doing it.’
This put a Plantagenet at once upon his mettle.
‘Certainly he did,’ Dick answered, almost haughtily. ‘It was a remnant of calf, no use for anything else, that I just made fit by designing those corners. He said I could use it up if I cared to take the trouble. And I did care to take the trouble, and to cut a block for the rose, and to put on the monogram, which was all my own business, in my own overtime. Three-and-sixpence is the amount it’s entered in the books for.’
Mary gazed hard at him in doubt. She scarcely knew what to do. She felt by pure instinct he was too much of a gentleman to insult him by offering him money for what had obviously been a labour of love to him; and yet, for her own part, she didn’t like to receive those handsome covers to some extent as a present from a perfect stranger, and especially from a man in his peculiar position. Still, what else could she do? The books were her own; she couldn’t refuse them now, merely because he chose to put a Tudor rose upon them — all the more as they contained those little marginal notes of ‘localities’ and ‘finds’ which even the amateur botanist prizes in his heart above all printed records; and she couldn’t bear to ask this grave and dignified young man to take the volumes back, remove the covers on which he had evidently spent so much pains and thought, and replace them by three-and-sixpence worth of plain cloth, unlettered. In the end she was constrained to say frigidly, in a lowered voice:
