Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  As father and son sat together at lunch, however, that morning in Edward Street, the Born Poet recurred somewhat tentatively to the intermitted subject.

  ‘I wish, pater,’ he said with assumed carelessness, ‘you could manage to do something or other for that fellow Plantagenet. He’s not a bad sort, though he’s eccentric; and he’s a real dab at history. He’s been a protégé of mine in a way since he came to Durham; and though he gives himself mysterious airs on the strength of his name, and is a bit of a smug at times, still there are really points about him. He’s simply wonderful on Henry the Second.’

  Sir Bernard hummed and hawed, and helped himself reflectively to another devilled anchovy.

  ‘This cook does savouries remarkably well,’ he replied, with oblique regard. ‘I never tasted anything better than these and his stuffed Greek olives. — Such places exist, of course, but they’re precious hard to get. Special aptitude for the work, and very close relationship to a Cabinet Minister, are indispensable qualifications. However, I’ll bear it in mind — I’ll bear it in mind for you, Trevor. I shall be dining with Sir Everard on Tuesday week, and I’ll mention the matter to him.’

  Whether Sir Bernard mentioned the matter to the famous Minister or not, history fails to record for us. That sort of history always goes unwritten. But it happened, at any rate, that by the end of the next week the Dean called up Gillespie after lecture one morning, and informed him privately that a letter had arrived that day from a distinguished person, inquiring particularly after Mr. Richard Plantagenet’s qualifications for the post of Assistant-Decipherer to the Pipe-roll and Tally Office, with special reference to his acquaintance with legal Norman-French and mediæval Latin.

  ‘And I was able,’ the Dean added, ‘to enclose in my reply a most satisfactory testimonial to your friend’s knowledge of both from our two chief history lecturers.’

  Gillespie thanked him warmly, but said nothing to Dick about it.

  Three days later a big official envelope, inscribed in large print ‘On Her Majesty’s Service,’ arrived at the door of Third Pair left, Back Quad, addressed to Richard Plantagenet, Esq.,.Durham College, Oxford. Dick opened it with great trepidation; this was surely a bad moment to come down upon his poor purse with a demand for income tax. But he read the contents with breathless astonishment. It was to the effect that the Right Honourable the Director of Pipe-rolls, having heard of Mr. Plantagenet as possessing a unique acquaintance with Norman-French documents, and an efficient knowledge of mediæval Latin, desired to offer him the post of Assistant Registrar and Chief Clerk in his office, an appointment directly in the Bight Honourable’s own gift, and carrying with it a salary commencing at two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and rising by annual increments of ten pounds at a time to a maximum of four hundred.

  To the family at Chiddingwick such an income as that was unimagined wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Dick rushed off with the letter in hot haste to Gillespie, who received him with the quiet smile of a consummate confederate.

  ‘The only thing about it that makes me hesitate,’ Dick cried, with a strange moisture in his clear blue eyes, ’is just this, Gillespie — oughtn’t the post by rights to have been put up to public competition? Mayn’t I perhaps be keeping some better man out of it?’

  Gillespie smiled again; he had been fully prepared beforehand for that qualm of the sensitive Plantagenet conscience.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, pressing Dick’s arm, ‘that’s not a question for you, don’t you see, at all, but for the Government and the Legislature. If they choose to decide that this particular post is best filled up by private nomination, I don’t think it’s for the nominee to raise the first objection — especially when he’s a man who must feel himself capable of doing the particular work in question at least as well as any other fellow in England is likely to do it. I’m no great believer myself in the immaculate wisdom of kings or governments, which seem to me to consist, like any other committee, of human beings; but there are some posts, I really think and believe, that can best be filled up by careful individual choice, and not by competition; and this post you’re now offered seems to me just one of them. If governments always blundered on as good a man to do the work that then and there wants doing — why, I, for one, would be a deal better satisfied with them.’

  So that very afternoon Dick went down to Chiddingwick to bear news to Maud and his mother of this piece of good fortune that had dropped as it seemed from the clouds upon them. For he never knew, either then or afterwards, what part that wily diplomate, Sir Bernard Gillingham, had borne in procuring the offer of the post for him. If he had known, it is probable he would have declined to accept any favour at all from the father of the man who, as he firmly believed, had helped to kill his father. Maud’s triumph and delight, however, were unclouded and unbounded; this event served to show the wisdom of her pet policy; but she seemed hardly so much astonished at the news, Dick thought, as he himself had expected. This was the less to be wondered at, because, in point of fact, it was not quite so novel to her as it had been to Dick; for at that very moment Maud carried in her bosom a small square note, beginning, ‘Dear Miss Plantagenet,’ and signed, ‘Ever yours most sincerely, Archibald Gillespie,’ in which the probability of just such an offer being made before long was not obscurely hinted at. However, Maud kept that letter entirely to herself; it was not the first — or the last — she received from the same quarter.

  This change of front affected all their movements. As soon as term was ended, Dick went up to London to take up the duties and emoluments of his office. But that was not all. By Gillespie’s advice — Gillespie seemed to take an almost fraternal interest now in the affairs of the family — Mrs. Plantagenet and the children moved to London, too, to be with Dick in his lodgings. Gillespie thought Miss Plantagenet’s musical taste so remarkable, he said, that she ought to be intown, where sound instruction could be got in singing; and he was so full of this point that Maud consented to give up her own work at Chiddingwick and take a place as daily governess in London instead, going out in the afternoon to a famous vocalist. Gillespie believed they ought all to be removed as far as possible from the blighting memory of their father’s degradation; and he attached so much importance to this matter that he came down once or twice to Chiddingwick himself during the Christmas vacation, in order to see them all safely removed to Pimlico.

  It was wonderful, Dick thought, what a brotherly interest that good fellow always took in all that concerned them; yet when he said so to Maud, that unconscionable young woman only blushed and looked down with a self-conscious air that was very unusual to her. But there! girls are so queer: though Gillespie had been so kind, Maud never once said a word, as one might naturally have expected, about how nice he had been to them. For his part, Dick thought her almost positively ungrateful.

  CHAPTER XVII. IN SEARCH OF AN ANCESTOR.

  Dick’s first year at the Pipe-roll was anything but a lazy one. Opulence in the shape of two hundred and fifty a year came to him with the encumbrance of plenty to do for it. 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. However, the year wore on, as most years wear on, good, bad, or indifferent; and Mary Tudor, too, left her place at Chiddingwick Rectory, and got another one, better paid, with nice people in Westminster. She was a constant Sunday visitor at the Plantagenets’ rooms; and so, in vacation, was Archie Gillespie, whose unfailing devotion to his college friend struck Dick every day as something truly remarkable. Brothers are so dense. Maud smiled at him often. If he h
ad paid a quarter the attention to any other girl that Archie paid her, how instantly she would have perceived it! But Dick — dear Dick — never seemed to suspect that Archie could come for anything else on earth except to talk over the affairs of the family with him. And yet men consider women the inferior creatures!

  Much of Dick’s spare time, however — for, being a very busy man, of course he had often spare time on his hands, amounting frequently to as much as half an hour together — was spent in a curious yet congenial occupation — the laborious hunting-up of the Plantagenet pedigree. 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. Now, the Plantagenets had preserved their strong sense of self-respect and many other valuable personal characteristics under trying circumstances, by dint of this self-same family pride. It was almost necessary, therefore, that when Dick found himself in a position to prove, as he thought, the goodness of his claim to represent in our day the old Plantagenet stock, he should prosecute the research after the missing links with all the innate energy of his active nature.

  Mary Tudor, indeed, whose practical common-sense was of a different order, sometimes regretted that Dick should waste so much valuable time on so unimportant an object; to her it seemed a pity that a man whose days were mainly spent in poring over dusty documents in the public service should devote a large part of his evenings as well to poring over other equally dusty documents for a personal and purely sentimental purpose.

  ‘What good will it do you, Dick, even if you do find out you’re the rightful heir to the throne of England?’ she asked him more than once. ‘Parliament won’t repeal the Acts of Union with Scotland and Ireland, and get rid of the Settlement, to make you King and Maud and Nellie Princesses of the blood royal.’

  Dick admitted that was so; but, still, her frivolity shocked him.

  ‘It’s a noble inheritance!’ he said, with a touch of romance in his voice. ‘Surely, Mary, you wouldn’t wish me to remain insensible, like a log, to the proud distinction of so unique an ancestry! They were such men, those old Plantagenets! Look at Henry II., for example, who founded our House for most practical purposes; there was a wonderful organizer for you! And Edward I. — what a statesman! so far before his age! and the Black Prince — and Edward III. — and Henry V., what strategists! It isn’t merely that they were kings, mind you; I don’t care about that; since I came to know what really makes a man great, I haven’t attached so much importance to the mere fact of their position. But just see what workers the old Plantagenets were in themselves, and how much they did for the building-up of England — and, indeed, of all Britain, if it comes to that, for wasn’t Scotch independence itself a direct result of the national opposition to Edward Plantagenet’s premature policy of unification? When I think of all those things I feel a glow of pride; I realize to myself what a grand heritage it is to be the descendant and representative of such early giants; for there were giants in those days, and no man could then be King unless he had at least a strenuous personality — oftenest, too, unless he were also a real live statesman. Our ancestors themselves knew all that very well; and when one of our line fell short of his ancestral standard, like Edward II. and Richard II., he went soon to the wall, and made way for a stronger. It’s not about them I care, nor about mere puling devotees like poor Henry III.; it’s my descent from men like those great early organizers, and thinkers, and rulers, who built up the administrative and judicial system we all still live under.’

  When he talked like that, Maud thought it was really beautiful. 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. Of course, that’s pure moonshine. Still, we must always remember it was the Plantagonet pedigree that gave our Dick his first interest in English history, and so made him what he is; and anything deserves respect which could keep Edmund Plantagenet’s children from degenerating, as they would have degenerated, from their father’s example, without this inspiriting idea of noblesse oblige: an idea which has made Dick and Maud — I mean, Miss Plantagenet — hold their heads high through life in spite of their poverty. It can do Dick no harm now to pursue a little farther this innocent hobby; it will give him a better insight into the by-ways and alleys of early English history; and if he can really establish the Plantagenet pedigree throughout, it may serve to call attention to him as a sound historical researcher. Fortunately, he knows what evidence is; and he won’t go wrong, therefore, by making heedless assumptions and incredible skips and jumps, like half our genealogists.’

  So Dick persevered for fully twelve months in his eager attempt, by hook and by crook, to trace his own family up to Lionel of Clarence, upon whom Mr. Plantagenet himself had early fixed — at pure haphazard — as the special transmitter of the Plantagenet blood to the later branches of the House, himself included. The longer Dick worked at it, too, the more confident he became of ultimate success. Step by step turned out right. He had brought the thing down, he told Mary, to a moral certainty; only one link now remained to complete the entire pedigree. That’s always the way, it may be mentioned parenthetically, with your doubtful genealogy; there’s only one link missing — but, unfortunately, that’s the link on proof of which the whole chain is dependent. And very naturally, too: for this is how the thing works out. You track your own genealogy, let us say, back to a person named Plantagenet, who lived some time in the sixteenth century, and with whom you are really and undoubtedly connected by an unbroken and traceable ancestral series. Then you track the family tree of Lionel of Clarence forward, in the opposite direction, to a real and historical Plantagenet who ‘flourished,’ as the books say, near the end of the fifteenth century. After that you say: ‘If my ancestor, the sixteenth-century Plantagenet, turns out to be the son of Lionel’s descendant in the fifteenth century — as is extremely probable — why, then, it’s all made out — I’m descended direct from Lionel of Clarence; and in any case, don’t you see, there’s only one link missing!’ Wise genealogists usually abstain on purpose from the attempt to hunt up that fatal missing link; they know right well that the safest plan is to assume identity, while efforts at proving it are frequently disastrous. But Dick was still young, and not perhaps overwise; so once he had brought down the matter to a question of a solitary missing link, he couldn’t rest night or day till he had finally settled it.

  One evening he returned home from the office to Maud, overflowing with a new and most important discovery.

  ‘Well, the thing’s all but proved, at last!’ he cried in a triumphant voice, as he kissed her warmly; ‘at least, that is to say, I’ve found a valuable clue that will decide the matter finally one way or the other. I’ve discovered a conveyance of the sixteenth century, dated 1533 — here’s a verbatim copy of it — which describes Thomas Plantagenet, our great-great-grandfather’s grandfather, as being really the son of Giles Plantagenet, the missing-link man, who is said in it to have owned a house — and this, you will see, is the new and important point — at Framlingham, in Suffolk. He seems to have been some sort of a petty tradesman.

  Where Giles first came from, we had till now no means of knowing. But af
ter this clue, all we’ve got to do next is just to hunt up the local records at Framlingliam and find out that this Giles Plantagenet, already known to us, was the son of that Geoffrey Plantagenet of Richmond, in Yorkshire, whom I showed long ago to have been the last traceable descendant of Lionel of Clarence, and concerning whom Lysons says, without a shadow of authority, decissit sine prole — he died without issue.’

  ‘It seems rather a leap, though, for those days, doesn’t it,’ Mary put in timidly, for she dreaded the effect of a disappointment upon Dick’s nervous nature, ‘from Richmond to Framlingham? I thought people rarely went then much beyond their own county.’

  ‘That was true, no doubt, for the middle and lower classes,’ Dick answered with a faint tinge of Plantagenet pride in his voice; ‘but hardly even then, I should say, for people of such distinction as Geoffrey Plantagenet. Gentlemen of high rank, and members of the peerage and the Royal Family, had manors, you know, in many different counties, and moved on from one to another from time to time, or left them about by will to various sons and daughters. We mustn’t judge such great folk by the common analogies of ordinary people.’

  ‘Still, Dick,’ Maud interposed, a little startled herself, ‘even if Mary’s objection doesn’t hold good, it does seem a little odd, doesn’t it, that Giles Plantagenet should be a petty tradesman at Framlingham, if he was really the son of such a man as Geoffrey, whom we know to have been a county gentleman of distinction in Yorkshire?’

  ‘I don’t think so at all,’ Dick answered with a little surprise. ‘In those days, you see, Maud, when there was no middle class, people went up and down easily. Attainder was so common, and loss of estates such an every-day occurrence, that the vicissitudes of families must often have been much more rapid and startling than nowadays. Moreover, it’s no use arguing beforehand about a plain question of fact. It was so, or it wasn’t. I shall soon find out which. The records are almost sure to be preserved at Framlingham, because it was the seat of the Howards; and I shall go down there next Bank Holiday and settle the question. After that, I’ll publish the result of my search; and then nobody will ever be able to say in future we made a false pretence of being real royal Plantagenets.’