by Grant Allen
He spoke so confidently that he really frightened poor Mary. She couldn’t help thinking what a terrible shock it would be to him if by any chance he should turn out after all to be mistaken, and if Giles Plantagenet should prove to be other than the son of Geoffrey.
So real did this danger appear to her, indeed, that as Bank Holiday approached, and Dick talked more and more certainly of his visit to Framling-ham, she spoke quite seriously on the matter to Maud.
‘Do you know, dear,’ she said, taking her friend’s hand, ‘if I could have got away for the day, I’d go right down to Framlingham with him, though it seems to me a dreadful waste of money for so useless a purpose.’ At that, Maud’s eyes flashed; poor dear Mary! she never would understand the feelings of a Plantagenet. ‘What I feel is this,’ Mary went on, all unheeding: ‘I’m obliged to stop at home that day with the children; but I wish I could go: for if by any chance it should happen to turn out that’ Dick was mistaken after all, and Giles Plantagenet wasn’t the son of Geoffrey, I’m afraid the shock would quite unman him for the moment, and I hardly know what he might be tempted to do in the first keen sense of intense disappointment.’
Maud’s lip curled slightly. Nursery governess as she was, the old dancing-master’s daughter had all the pride of a Duchess — and why not, indeed, since she was a Princess of the blood royal?
‘Oh, that wouldn’t make any difference, dear,’ she answered confidently. ‘We are Plantagenets, don’t you see? And if we don’t happen to be descended from that particular man Geoffrey, we must be descended through some other member of the Plantagenet family. My poor father was sure of it; and it’s always been known in Yorkshire for many generations.’
However, Mary was so urgent, and so afraid of the consequences of a sudden disappointment — for she knew Dick’s nature, and loved him dearly — that at last Maud consented to accompany her brother on his projected trip, and guard him against the results of an impossible failure.
Bank Holiday came in due time — a lovely summer day; and Dick and Maud went down together by cheap train to Framlingham. The banks by the side of the rail were thick with flowers. They reached there early in the day, and Dick called upon the Rector at once, sending in his card with name and address at the Pipe-rolls. As he expected, that introduction amply sufficed him. Nor was he disappointed about the preservation of the Framlingham records. The church possessed a singularly perfect collection of baptismal and marriage entries from the beginning of the fifteenth century onward. In less than half an hour Dick was thick in their midst, turning over the dusty leaves of those worn old books with all the eagerness and enthusiasm of a born genealogist.
Maud sat with him for awhile in the gloom of that dimly-lighted chancel; but after half an hour or more of hunting page by page, her patience began to give out, and she proposed to stroll away towards the castle ruins, and return a little later to see how Dick progressed with his quest after ancestors. Dick acquiesced readily enough, and Maud went off by herself down the leafy lane that leads straight to the castle.
For some time she amused herself in the deep hollow of the moat, and waited round the great circuit of the frowning rampart. It was a splendid ruin, she thought, the finest she had seen. Then she mounted the broken wall, and looked out upon the wide plain, and admired the beautiful view of the church and village. A flag floated from the tower, as if in honour of Dick’s presence. At last, as lunch-time approached, she lounged back lazily to Dick. They had brought their own bread and cheese and a few sandwiches with them, and she had picked out mentally a cool spot under the spreading chestnuts, which seemed to her the very place in which to make their impromptu picnic. So she opened the church door in very good spirits, for the fresh country air had exhilarated her like champagne after so long a spell of that dusty London; and she went straight to the chancel, where she had left poor Dick an hour before among his tattered registers.
As she drew near, a sudden terror rushed over her unexpectedly. What on earth could this mean? Dick was gazing at the books with an ashen-white face, and with eyes that fairly started out of their sockets for staring. He raised his head and looked at her. He couldn’t speak for horror. With one hand he beckoned his sister mysteriously to his side; then he moistened his lips at last and pointed with one accusing finger to the entries.
‘Look there, Maud,’ he faltered with a painful effort; and Maud looked where he bid her.
It was a mongrel entry, half Latin, half English: ‘Die 14 Junii, anno 1498, Giles, the son of Richard Plantagenet, cobbler, and of Joan, uxoris eius, huius parochiæ.’
Maud glanced at the words herself with a certain vague sense of terror.
‘But perhaps,’ she cried, ‘after all, this Richard Plantagenet himself was of royal ancestry.’
Dick shook his head with a terrible, a despondent shake. He knew when he was beaten.
‘Oh no,’ he answered aloud, though he could hardly frame the words. ‘I know what I say. I’ve found out all about this Richard Plantagenet, Maud. He was the ancestor of the other people — the false Plantagenets, don’t you know, the Sheffield family who left the money. He never was a true Plantagenet in any way at all. It was only a nickname. He acted the parts of the Plantagenet kings, one after the other, in a masque or pageant, and was known from that time by pure fun as Richard Plantagenet. But that was in London; and we didn’t know till now he was ever settled at Framlingham.
‘And must we be descended from him, Dick?’ She asked it piteously, pleadingly.
‘Oh, Maud — yes, we must. There’s no other way out of it. I’ve worked up the whole thing so thoroughly now — to my own destruction. I know all about him. His real name was Muggins; and that’s our real name, too; and this book — this horrid book gives all the facts necessary to prove our descent from him; and the Sheffield people’s, too, who are really our cousins.’
He said it with utter despondency. The truth was wrenched out of him. Maud clasped her white hands and looked hard at poor Dick. This disillusion was just as terrible for her as for him.
‘You’re quite, quite sure?’ she murmured once more in a voice of pure agony.
‘Yes, quite, quite sure,’ Dick answered with a tremor, but with manful persistence. ‘There can’t be a doubt of it. I knew everything about this wretched creature before, except that he was a Framlingham man; and there are entries here in the book — you can see them for yourself — that leave no shadow of doubt anywhere about the fellow’s identity. Maud, Maud, it’s been all a foolish, foolish dream! We are not — we never were — real royal Plantagenets!’
Maud looked down at the ground and burst into hot tears.
‘Then I’ll never marry Archie,’ she cried. ‘Never, never, never! I’ll never ask him to take a mere nobody from Chiddingwick. My pride wouldn’t allow it — my pride would stand in the way — for I’m as proud as before, Dick, though I’m not a Plantagenet!’
CHAPTER XVIII. GOOD OUT OF EVIL.
That journey back to town was one of the most terrible things Maud had ever yet known in her poor little life. Dick leaned back disconsolate in one corner of the carriage, and she in the opposite one. Neither spoke a single word; neither needed to speak, for each knew without speech what the other was thinking of. Every now and again Dick would catch some fresh shade of expression coursing like a wave over Maud’s unhappy face, and recognise in it the very idea that a moment before had been passing through his own troubled mind. It was pitiable to see them. Their whole scheme of life had suddenly and utterly broken down before them; their sense of self-respect was deeply wounded — nay, even their bare identity was all but gone, for the belief that they were in very truth descendants of the royal Plantagenets had become as it were an integral part of their personality, and woven itself intimately into all their life and thought and practice. They ceased to be themselves in ceasing to be potential princes and princesses.
For the Great Plantagenet Delusion which Edmund Plantagenet had started, and only half or a quarter
believed in himself, became to his children from youth upward, and especially to Maud and Dick, a sort of family religion. It was a theory on which they based almost everything that was best and truest within them; a moral power for good, urging them always on to do credit to the great House from which they firmly and unquestioningly believed themselves to be sprung. Probably the moral impulse was there first by nature; probably, too, they inherited it, not from poor, drunken, do-nothing Edmund Plantagenet himself, through whom ostensibly they should have derived their Plantagenet character, but from that good and patient nobody, their hard-working mother. But none of these things ever occurred at all to Maud or Dick; to them it had always been a prime article of faith that noblesse oblige, and that their lives must be noble in order to come up to a preconceived Plantagenet standard of action. So the blow was a crushing one. It was as though all the ground of their being had been cut away from beneath their feet. They had fancied themselves so long the children of kings, with a moral obligation upon them to behave — well, as the children of kings are little given to behaving; and they had found out now they were mere ordinary mortals, with only the same inherent and universal reasons for right and high action as the common herd of us. It was a sad comedown — for a royal Plantagenet.
The revulsion was terrible. And Maud, who was in some ways the prouder of the two, and to whom, as to most of her sex, the extrinsic reason for holding up her head in the midst of poverty and disgrace had ever been stronger and more cogent than the intrinsic one, felt it much the more keenly. To women, the social side of things is always uppermost. They journeyed home in a constant turmoil of unrelieved wretchedness; they were not, they had never been, royal Plantagenots. Just like all the rest of the world — mere ordinary people! And they who had been sustained, under privations and shame, by the reflection that, if every man had his right, Dick would have been sitting that day on the divided throne of half these islands! Descendants, after all, of a cobbler and a dancing-master! No Black Prince at all in their lineage — no Henry, no Edward, no Richard, no Lionel! Cour-de-Lion a pale shade — Lackland himself taken away from them! And how everybody would laugh when they came to know the truth! Though that was a small matter. It was no minor thing like this, but the downfall of a faith, the ruin, of a principle, the break-up of a rule in life, that really counted!
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.
Dick opened the door in dead silence and entered. He was pale as a ghost. Maud walked statelily behind him, scarcely able to raise her eyes to Archie Gillespie’s face, but still proud at heart as ever. Dick sank down into a chair, the very picture of misery. Maud dropped into another without doing more than just stretch out one cold hand to Archie. Mrs. Plantagenet surveyed them both with a motherly glance.
‘Why, Dick,’ she cried, rushing up to him, ‘what’s the matter? Has there been a railway accident?’
Dick glanced back at her with affection half masked by dismay.
‘A railway accident!’ he exclaimed, with a groan. ‘Oh, mother dear, I wish it had only been a railway accident! It was more like an earthquake. It’s shaken Maud and me to the very foundations of our nature!’ Then he looked up at her half pityingly. She wasn’t a Plantagenet except by marriage; she never could quite feel as they did the sanct —— And then he broke off suddenly, for he remembered with a rush that horrid, horrid truth. He blurted it out all at once: ‘We are not — we never were, real royal Plantagenets!’
‘I was afraid of that,’ Mary Tudor said simply. ‘That was just why I was so anxious dear Maud should go with you.’
Gillespie said nothing, but for the first time in public he tried to take Maud’s hand for a moment in his. Maud drew it away quickly.
‘No, Archie,’ she said, with a sigh, making no attempt at concealment; ‘I can never, never give it to you now again, for to-day I know we’ve always been nobodies.’
‘You’re what you always were to me,’ Gillespie answered, in a low voice. ‘It was you yourself I loved, Maud, not the imaginary honours of the Plantagenet family.’
‘But I don’t want to be loved so,’ Maud cried, with all the bitterness of a wounded spirit. ‘I don’t want to be loved for myself. I don’t want anyone to love me — except as a Plantagenet.’
Dick was ready, in the depth of his despair and the blackness of his revulsion, to tell out the whole truth, and spare them, as he thought, no circumstance of their degradation.
‘Yes, we went to Framlingham princes and princesses — and more than that,’ he said, almost proud to think whence and how far they had fallen’; ‘we return from it beggars. I looked up the whole matter thoroughly, and there’s no room for hope left, no possibility of error. The father of Giles Plantagenet, from whom we’re all descended, most fatally descended, was one Richard — called Plantagenet, but really Muggins, a cobbler at Framlingham; the same man, you know, Mary, that I told you about the other day. In short, we’re just cousins of the other Plantagenets — the false Plantagenets — the Sheffield Plantagenets — the people who left the money.’
He fired it off at them with explosive energy. Mary gave a little start.
‘But surely in that case, Dick,’ she cried, ‘you must be entitled to their fortune! You told me one day it was left by will to the descendants and heirs-male of Richard Muggins, alias Plantagenet, whose second son George was the ancestor and founder of the Sheffield family.’
‘So he was,’ Dick answered dolefully, without a light in his eye. ‘But, you see, I didn’t then know, or suspect, or even think possible — what I now find to be the truth — the horrid, hateful truth — that our ancestor, Giles Plantagenet, whom I took to be the son of Geoffrey, the descendant of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, was in reality nothing more than the eldest son of this wretched man Richard Muggins; and the elder brother of George Muggins, alias Plantagenet, who was ancestor of the Sheffield people who left the money.’
‘But if so,’ Gillespie put in, ‘then you must be the heirs of the Plantagenets who left the money, and must be entitled, as I understand, to something like a hundred and fifty or a hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling!’
‘Undoubtedly,’ Dick answered in a tone of settled melancholy. .
Gillespie positively laughed, in spite of himself, though Maud looked up at him through her tears, and murmured:
‘Oh, Archie, how can you?
‘Why, my dear follow,’ he said, taking Dick’s arm, ‘are you really quite sure it’s so? Are you perfectly certain you’ve good legal proof of the identity of this man Giles with your own earliest ancestor, and of the descent of your family from the forefather of the Sheffield people?’
‘I’m sorry to say,’ Dick answered with profound dejection, ‘there can’t be a doubt left of it. It’s too horribly certain. Hunting up these things is my trade, and I ought to know. I’ve made every link in the chain as certain as certainty. I have a positive entry for every step in the pedigree — not doubtful entries, unfortunately, but such conclusive entries as leave the personality of each person beyond the reach of suspicion. Oh, it’s a very bad business, a terrible business!’ And he flung his arms on the table, and leaned over it himself, the very picture of mute misery.
‘Then you believe the money’s yours?’ Gillespie persisted, half incredulous.
‘Believe it!’ Dick answered. ‘I don’t believe it; I know it is — the wretched stuff! There’s no dodging plain facts. I can’t get out of it, anyhow.’
‘Did you realize that this money would be yours when you saw the entries at Framli
ngham?’ Gillespie inquired, hardly certain how to treat such incredible behaviour.
‘I didn’t think of it just at once,’ Dick answered with profound despair in his voice; ‘but it occurred to me in the train, and I thought how terrible it would be to confess it before the whole world by claiming the wretched money. Though it might perhaps be some consolation, after all, to poor mother.’
‘And you, Maud?’ Gillespie inquired, turning round to his sweetheart, and with difficulty repressing a smile. ‘Did you think at all of it?’
‘Well, I knew if we were really only false Plantagenets, like the Sheffield people,’ Maud answered bravely through the tears that struggled hard to fall, ‘we should probably in the end come into their money. 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. All they thought themselves once, all they practically were for so many years together, they have suddenly ceased to be. This grief and despair must wear itself out. For the present we mustn’t even inquire of them about the money.’
And indeed it was a week or two before Dick could muster up heart to go with Archie Gillespie to a lawyer about the matter. When he did, however, he had all the details of the genealogy, all the proofs of that crushing identification he had longed to avoid, so fully at his finger-ends, that the solicitor whom he consulted, and to whom he showed copies of the various documents in the case, hadn’t a moment’s doubt as to the result of his application. ‘I suppose this will be a long job, though,’ Gillespie suggested, ‘and may want a lot of money, to prosecute it to its end?
