by Grant Allen
‘He’s drunk now, anyhow — dead drunk,’ one of the gentlemanly and congenial young fellows half whispered to Gillingham. ‘Let’s mix all the heeltaps for him with a little soapsuds, and make him swallow them off out of the washhand basin, shall we?’
Gillingham’s taste was revolted by the gross vulgarity of this practical suggestion. ‘No, no!’ he replied, without attempting to conceal his genuine disgust; ‘have you no respect at all for his age and his degradation? Don’t you know that a drunken old man is too sacred a thing to be made the common butt of your vulgar ridicule? Dionysus was a great god — a great god in his cups — and even Silenus still retains the respect due to gray hairs. Let him alone, I say; he has lowered himself enough, and more than enough, already, without your trying to lower him any further.’
‘Why, you helped in the fun as well as we did,’ Westall answered, grumbling. ‘You needn’t try to go and make yourself out such a saint as all that after it’s done and finished, for it was you who got him on his legs to make a fool of himself, anyhow.’ ‘Shakespeare must have studied his Falstaff at all moments and in all phases,’ Gillingham replied oracularly, with his gravest irony; ‘but I refuse to believe he ever conspired with a set of young blockheads at the Boar in Eastcheap to mix dregs of sherris sack with beer and soapsuds in a common washhand basin for Green or Marlowe. The Born Poet observes; he does not instigate.’
‘Hush, hush!’ Faussett cried again. ‘Mr. Plantagenet is going to address us. Another speech from the Plantagenet!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Gillingham echoed as before. ‘More experiences, more experiences! Life is wide, and its reflection must be many-sided; we want all experiences harmoniously combined to produce the poet, the philosopher, and the ruler.’
‘Gentlemen,’ Mr. Plantagenet began afresh, rising feebly to his legs and gazing around upon the assembled little crowd in puzzled bewilderment, ‘I’m not quite myself this evening, ladies and gentlemen; my old complaint, my old complaint, gentlemen.’ Here he laid his hand pathetically upon his heart, amid a chorus of titters. ‘Gentlemen, choose your partners. Bow, and fall into places. Eight bars before beginning, then advance in couples — right, left — down the middle. I’ll strike up immediately. My violin, my violin! what have you done with it, gentlemen?’
‘Gracious heavens!’ Gillingham cried, looking over to Faussett, and hardly more than half whispering; ‘why, don’t you understand? the man’s a dancing-master. He thinks we’re his pupils, and he’s going to make us dance the lancers!’
‘By Jove, so he is!’ Faussett exclaimed, delighted at this new development of the situation.
‘Let’s humour him. Fall into places, and let’s have the lancers. Here, Tremenbeere, you be my partner.’
But before they could carry out this ingenious arrangement Mr. Plantagenet had suddenly discovered his mistake, and sat down, or, rather, sank with Gillingham’s assistance into his easy-chair, where he sat now once more, blankly smiling a vacuous and impenetrable smile upon the uproarious company.
‘Stick him out in the yard!’ ‘Pour cold water over him!’ ‘Give him a dose of cayenne!’
‘Turn his coat inside out, and send him to find his way home with a label pinned upon him!’ shouted a whole chorus of congenial and gentlemanly young fellows in varying voices, with varying suggestions for completing the degradation of the poor drunken old creature.
‘No!’ Gillingham thundered out in a voice of supreme command; ‘do nothing of the sort. You wretched Philistines, you’ve had your fun out of him; and precious poor fun it is, too — all you, who are not students of human nature. You’ve got to leave him alone, now, I tell you, and give him time to recover. — Here, Faussett, lend me a hand with him; he’s sound asleep. Let’s put him over here to sleep it off upon the sofa.’
Faussett obeyed without a word, and they laid the old man out at full length on the couch to sleep off his first drowsiness.
‘Now draw him a bottle of neat seltzer,’ Gillingham went on with a commanding air; ‘you’ve got to get him out of college somehow before twelve o’clock, you know; and it’s better for yourselves to get him out sober. There’ll be a precious hot row if he goes out so drunk that the porter has to help him, and worse still if the scouts come in and find him here in your rooms tomorrow morning.’
This common-sense argument, though coming from the Born Poet, seemed so far cogent to the half-tipsy lads that they forthwith exerted themselves to the utmost of their power in drawing the seltzer, and to holding it to Mr. Plantagenet’s unwilling lips. After a time the old man half woke up again dreamily, and then Gillingham set to work to try a notable experiment.
‘Have you ever heard of Barry Neville, Westall?’ he asked, looking hard at him.
‘Neville? Neville?’ Westall murmured, turning the name over dubiously. ‘Well, no, I don’t think so. Of this college?’
‘Of this college!’ Gillingham echoed contemptuously. ‘Of this college indeed! No, not of this college. The ideas of most Durham men seem to be bounded strictly by the four blessed walls of this particular college! I thought you wouldn’t know him; I guessed as much. And yet he had once a European reputation. Barry Neville,’ raising his voice so that Mr. Plantagenet should hear him distinctly— ‘Barry Neville was an able essayist, poet and journalist of the middle period of this present century.’
‘Well?’ Westall went on inquiringly.
‘Well,’ Gillingham answered, nodding his head with a mysterious look towards the half-awakened drunkard, who had started up at the sound of that familiar name, ‘there he lies over on the sofa.’
This last was murmured below his breath to the other lads, so that Mr. Plantagenet didn’t catch it in his further corner.
‘I’m going to try the effect of a bit of his own writing upon him to-night,’ Gillingham continued quietly. ‘I’m going to see whether it’ll rouse him, or whether he’ll even recognise it. — Here, you men, stop your row. I’m thinking of giving you a little recitation.’
‘Hear, hear!’ Faussett cried, languidly interested in the strange experiment. ‘Gillingham for a recitation! — You know, Mr. Plantagenet, our friend Gillingham, the Born Poet, is celebrated as one of the finest and most versatile reciters in all England.’
‘What’s he going to give us?’ Mr. Plantagenet asked, endeavouring to seem quite wide-awake, and to assume a carefully critical attitude.
‘A piece from a forgotten author,’ Gillingham answered with quiet dignity. And then, mounting upon the table, and ensuring silence by a look or two flung with impartial aim at the heads of all those who still continued to talk or giggle, he began, in his clear, loud, sonorous voice, to deliver with very effective rhetoric a flashy show-piece, which he had long known by heart among his immense repertory, from the ‘Collected Essays of Barry Neville.’
‘But of all the terrible downfalls which this world encloses for the eye of the attentive and observant spectator, what downfall, I ask, can be more terrible or more ghastly than that inevitable decadence from the golden hopes and aspirations of youth, to the dreary realities and blasted ideals of dishonoured age? For the young man, this prosaic planet floats joyously and lightly down a buoyant atmosphere of purpled clouds; his exuberant fancy gilds the common earth as the dying sunlight gilds the evening waters with broad streets and paths of refulgent glory. To the old man, the sun itself has faded slowly, but hopelessly, out of the twilight heavens: dark and murky fogs, risen from behind the shadows of that unknown future, have obscured and disfigured with their dark exhalations the bright imaginings of his joyous springtide: evil habits, begun in the mere rush of youthful spirits, have clung to and clogged the marred wings of his soul, till at last, disheartened, disgraced, unhonoured and unfriended, he drifts gradually onward down the unrelenting stream of the years to that final cataract where all his hopes, alike of time and of eternity, are doomed to be finally wrecked and confounded together in one unutterable and irretrievable ruin.
‘“Nay, think not,
young man, that, because you are gay and bright and vital to-day, you will find the path of life throughout as smooth and easy as you find it now at the very start or outset of your appointed pilgrimage. Those juicy fruits that stretch so temptingly by the bosky wayside — those golden apples of the Hesperides that hang so lusciously from the bending boughs — those cool draughts that spring so pellucid from yon welling fountain — those fair nymphs that bid you loiter so often among the roses and eglantines of yon shady bowers — all, all, though they smile so innocent and so attractive, are but deceitful allurements to delay your feet and intoxicate your senses, toils to lead you aside from the straight but thorny road of right and duty into the brighter but deadly track of fatal self-indulgence. Yet, above all things, if you would be wise, O youth! shun that sparkling beaker, which the cunning tempter, like Comus in the masque, holds out to you too enticingly to quench your ardent thirst: quaff it not, though it dance and glitter so merrily in the sunlight, for there is death in the cup; it leads you on slowly and surely to the dishonoured grave; it loses you, one after another, health, wealth, and youth, and friends, and children; it covers you with shame, disgrace, and humiliation, and in the end this, this, this is the miserable plight to which it finally reduces what may once have been a man of birth, of learning, of genius, and of reputation.”’ It was a tawdry bit of cheap rhetoric enough, to be sure, penned by Edmund Plantagenet in his palmiest days, when he still cherished his dream of literary greatness, in feeble imitation of De Quincey’s rounded and ornate periods; but delivered as Trevor Gillingham knew how to deliver the merest tinsel, with rolling voice and profound intonations of emotion, it struck even those graceless, half-tipsy undergraduates as a perfect burst of the divinest eloquence. They didn’t notice at the moment its cheap effectiveness, its muddled metaphors, its utter vulgarity of idea and expression; they were taken unexpectedly by its vivid separate elements, its false gallop of prose, its quick turns of apostrophe, exhortation and sentimentalism, its tricky outer semblance of poetical phraseology. And Gillingham knew how to make the very best of it: pointing now with his left hand upward to the golden apples of the Hesperides hanging from the imaginary branches of trees overhead; now with his right to one side toward the fair nymphs loitering unperceived in their invisible bowers among the Carlsbad plums; and now again with both together downwards towards the awful abyss that he seemed to behold opening unseen upon the carpet before him. And when at last he reached the weak and tawdry climax, ‘this, this is the plight to which it finally reduces a man of genius,’ he gave fresh point to the words by turning his forefinger relentlessly and reproachfully toward the very author who wrote them, the now fully-awakened and listening dancing-master.
And Edmund Plantagenet himself? Sitting up, half recumbent, upon the bare little sofa, with bloodshot eyes gazing out straight in front of him, he seemed transfixed and spell-bound by the sudden sound of his own young words coming back to him so unexpectedly across the gulf of blighted hopes and forgotten aspirations. Listening eagerly with strained ears to Gillingham’s high and measured, cadences, the old man felt for a moment inspired with a new and strange admiration for his own unrecognised eloquence. The phrases, though he remembered them well, seemed to him far finer than when he first had written them — and so indeed they were, transfigured and reduced to a semblance of higher meaning by the practised reciter’s stirring elocution. The reciter had produced a deeper effect than he intended. One minute the old man sat there silent after Gillingham had finished, looking round him defiantly with his bloated red face upon those now sobered boys; then, with an unwonted burst of energy and fire, he cried aloud in a tone of suppressed passion:
‘Lads, lads, he says the truth! He says the truth! Every word of it. Do you know who wrote that magnificent passage of English rhetoric he has just repeated to you? Do you know who wrote it? It was me, me, me, the last of the Plantagenets! And he knows it. He’s been reciting it now to shame and disgrace me in my blighted old age. But, still — he has done wisely. He thought I was past shaming. Lads, lads, I’m not past it. I remember well when I wrote that passage — and many another as fine, or finer. But that’s all gone now, and what am I to-day? A miserable drunken old country dancing-master, that a pack of irreverent Oxford boys ask up to their rooms to make fun of him by getting him to drink himself silly. But when I wrote that passage I was young, and full of hope, and an author, and a gentleman. Yes, boys, a gentleman. I knew all the best men and women of my time, and they thought well of me, and prophesied fair things for me not a few. Ah, yes, you may smile, but I remember to-night how Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself took me once by the hand in those days, and laid his honoured palms on my head, and gave me his blessing. And finely it’s been fulfilled!’ he added bitterly. ‘And finely it’s been fulfilled — as you see this evening!’
He rose, steady now and straight as an arrow, shaking his long gray hair fiercely off his forehead, and glaring with angry eyes at Trevor Gillingham. ‘Come, come,’ he said; ‘you’ve had your fun out, boys; you’ve seen the humiliation of a ruined old man. You’ve gloated over the end of somebody better to begin with than any one of you is or ever will be, if you live to be twice as old as Methuselah; and now you may go to your own rooms, and sleep your own silly debauch off at your leisure. I will go, too. I have learned something to-night. 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. But go on as you’ve begun — go on as you’ve begun, my fine fellows, and your end will be ten thousand times worse than mine is. Why,’ with a burst of withering indignation, ‘when I was your age, you soulless, senseless, tipsy young reprobates, I’d have had too much sense of shame, to get my passing amusement out of the pitiable degradation of a man who might fairly have been my grandfather!’
He walked to the door, upright, without flinching, and turned the handle, as sober for the minute as if he hadn’t tasted a single glass of sherry. Gillingham, thoroughly frightened now, tried his best to stop him.
‘I’m sorry I’ve hurt your feelings, Mr. Plan-tagenet,’ he stammered out, conscious even as he spoke how weak and thin were his own excuses by the side of the old man’s newly-quickened indignation. ‘I — I didn’t mean to offend you. I wanted to see — to see what effect a few of your own powerful words and periods would produce upon you, falling so unexpectedly on your ear in a society where you probably imagined you had never been heard of. I — I intended it merely as a delicate compliment.’
Edmund Plantagenet answered him never a word, but with a profound bow that had nothing of the dancing-master in it, but a great deal of the angry courtesy of fifty years since, shut the door sternly in his face, and turned to descend the winding stone staircase.
‘I’m afraid we’ve done it now, Faussett,’ Trevor Gillingham exclaimed, with a very white face, turning round to the awed and silent company. ‘I hope to goodness he won’t go and do himself some mischief!’
‘Too drunk for that,’ Faussett answered carelessly. ‘By the time he’s got downstairs he’ll forget all about it, and reel home to his lodgings as well as he can; he’ll never remember a word to-morrow morning.’
A minute later the door opened with a slight knock, and Richard Plantagenet entered, pale and trembling.
‘My father,’ he cried, looking about the room with a restless glance— ‘what have you done with my father? I heard his voice as I passed below your windows outside college a minute ago. — Where’s he gone, Gillingham? What’s he been doing in these rooms with you?’
‘Mr. Plantagenet has been spending the evening as my guest,’ Faussett answered, trying to look as unconcerned as possible; ‘but he’s just now left, and I believe he’s gone home to his own lodgings.’
Dick drew back in horror. He knew from the sound of hi
s father’s voice something very unwonted and terrible had happened. Though he had not caught a single word, never before had he heard those lips speak out with such real and angry dignity, and he trembled for the result of so strange an adventure. He rushed back to the porter’s lodge, for he had taken a stroll outside that evening on purpose, lest he should see his father the laughing-stock of Faussett and his companions.
‘For heaven’s sake, porter!’ he cried with fervour, ‘let me out — let me out — let me out, or there may be murder!’
‘Very sorry, sir,’ the porter answered with official calmness; the clock’s gone eleven. Can’t allow you out now without leave from the Dean, sir.’
‘Then Heaven save him!’ Richard cried, wringing his hands in helpless terror; ‘for if he goes out alone like that, God only knows what may become of him!’
‘If you mean the elderly gentleman from Mr. Faussett’s rooms, sir,’ the porter answered cheerfully, ‘he seemed to me to walk out quite soberlike and straight, as far as I could see, sir.’
But Dick turned and rushed wildly to his own rooms in the Back Quad, in an agony of suspense for his father’s safety.
CHAPTER XII TRAGEDY WINS.
Mr. Plantagenet had missed his son by walking through the archway of the Fellows’ Quad, instead of through the Brew House. He emerged from the college by the big front gate. The High Street was lighted and crowded; so he preferred to turn down the dark lanes and alleys at the back of Christ Church, till he came out upon St. Aldate’s and the road to the river. Somewhat sobered as he still was by the unwonted excitement of that curious episode, he found the sherry once more beginning to gain the upper hand; it was hard for him to walk erect and straight along the pavement of St. Aldate’s, where a few small shops still stood open — for it was Saturday night — and a few people still loitered about in little knots at the corners. 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.
