Delphi collected works o.., p.296
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 296
‘They’re extremely pretty. It was good of you to take so much trouble about an old book like this.
There’s the money; thank you — and — I’m greatly obliged to you.’
The words stuck in her throat. She said them almost necessarily with some little stiffness. And as she spoke she looked down, and dug her parasol into the gravel of the path for nervousness. But Richard Plantagenet’s pride was far deeper than her own. He took the money frankly; that was Mr. Wells’s; then he answered in that lordly voice he had inherited from his father:
‘I’m glad you like the design. It’s not quite original; I copied it myself with a few variations from the cover of a book that once belonged to Margaret Tudor. Her initials and yours are the same. But I see you think I oughtn’t to have done it. I’m sorry for that; yet I had some excuse. I thought a Plantagenet might venture to take a little more pains than usual over a book for a Tudor. Noblesse oblige.’
And as he spoke, standing a yard or two off her, with an air of stately dignity, he lifted his hat, and then moved slowly off down the path to the gate again.
Mary didn’t know why, but with one of those impulsive fits which often come over sympathetic women, she ran hastily after him.
‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, catching him up, and looking into his face with her own as flushed as his. ‘I’m afraid I’ve hurt you. I’m sure I didn’t mean to. It was very, very kind of you to design and print that monogram so nicely. I understand your reasons, and I’m immensely obliged. It’s a beautiful design. I shall be proud to possess it.’
As for Richard, he dared hardly raise his eyes to meet hers, they were so full of tears. This rebuff was very hard on him. But the tell-tale moisture didn’t quite escape Mary.
‘Thank you,’ he said simply. I meant no rudeness; very much the contrary. The coincidence interested me; it made me wish to do the thing for you as well as I could. I’m sorry if I was obtrusive. But — one sometimes forgets — or perhaps remembers. It’s good of you to speak so kindly.’
And he raised his hat once more, and, walking rapidly off without another word, disappeared down the road in the direction of the High Street.
As soon as he was gone Mary went back into the Rectory. Mrs. Tradescant, the Rector’s wife, was standing in the hall. Mary reflected at once that the little girl had listened open-eared to all this queer colloquy, and that, to prevent misapprehension, the best thing she could do would be to report it all herself before the child could speak of it. So she told the whole story of the strange young man who had insisted on binding her poor dog-eared old botany-book in such regal fashion. Mrs. Tradescant glanced at it, and only smiled.
‘Oh, my dear, you mustn’t mind him,’ she said. ‘He’s one of those crazy Plantagenets. They’re a very queer lot — as mad as hatters. The poor old father’s a drunken old wretch; come down in the world, they say. He teaches dancing; but his mania is that he ought by rights to be King of England. He never says so openly, you know; he’s too cunning for that; but in a covert sort of way he lays tacit claim to it. The son’s a very well-con-ducted young man in his own rank, I believe, but as cracked as the father; and as for the daughter, oh, my dear — such a stuck-up sort of a girl, with a feather in her hat and a bee in her bonnet, who goes out and gives music-lessons! It’s dreadful, really! She plays the violin rather nicely, I hear; but she’s an odious creature. The books? Oh yes, that’s just the sort of thing Dick Plantagenet would love. He’s mad on antiquity. If he saw on the title-page your name was Mary Tudor, he’d accept you at once as a remote cousin, and he’d claim acquaintance off-hand by a royal monogram. The rose is not bad. But the best thing you can do is to take no further notice of him.’
A little later that very same morning, however, Richard Plantagenet, mad or sane, was speeding away across country, in a parliamentary train, towards Reading and Oxford, decided in his own mind now about two separate plans he had deeply at heart. The first one was that, for the honour of the Plantagenets, he mustn’t fail to get that Scholarship at Durham College; the second was that, when he came back with it to Chiddingwick, he must make Mary Tudor understand he was at least a gentleman. He was rather less in love with her, to be sure, after this second meeting, than he had been after the first; but, still, he liked her immensely, and in spite of her coldness was somehow attracted towards her; and he couldn’t bear to think a mere Welsh Tudor, not even really royal, should feel herself degraded by receiving a gift of a daintily-bound book from the hands of the Heir Apparent of the true and only Plantagenets.
CHAPTER V. GOOD SOCIETY.
Dick knew nothing of Oxford, and would hardly even have guessed where in the town to locate himself while the examination was going on, had not his old head-master at Chiddingwick Grammar School supplied him with the address of a small hotel, much frequented by studious and economical young men on similar errands. Hither, then, he repaired, Gladstone bag in hand, and engaged a modest second-floor room; after which, with much trepidation, he sallied forth at once in his best black suit to call in due form on the Reverend the Dean at Durham College.
By the door of the Saracen’s Head, which was the old-fashioned name of his old-fashioned hostelry, two young men — mere overgrown schoolboys of the Oxford pattern — lounged, chatting and chaffing together, as if bent on some small matter of insignificant importance. Each swung a light cane, and each looked and talked as if the town were his freehold. One was a fellow in a loose gray tweed suit and a broad-brimmed slouch-hat of affectedly large and poetical pretensions; the other was a faster-looking and bolder young person, yet more quietly clad in a black cut-away coat and a billycock hat, to which commonplace afternoon costume of the English gentleman he nevertheless managed to give a touch of distinctly rowdy and rapid character.
As Dick passed them on the steps to go forth into the street, the young man in black observed oracularly: ‘Lamb ten to the slaughter to which his companion answered with brisk good-humour in the self-same dialect: ‘Lamb ten it is; these meadows pullulate; we shall have a full field of them.’
By a burst of inspiration Dick somehow gathered that they were referring to the field for the Durham Scholarships, and that they knew of ten candidates at least in the place who were also going in for them. He didn’t much care for the looks of his two fellow-competitors, for such he judged them to be; but the mere natural loneliness of a sensitive young man in such strange conditions somehow’ prompted him, almost against his will, to accost them.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said timidly, in a rather soft voice, ‘but I — that is to say — could you either of you tell me which is the nearest way to Durham College?’
The lad in the gray tweed suit laughed, and surveyed him from head to foot with a somewhat supercilious glance as he answered with a curious self-assertive swagger: ‘You’re going to call on the Dean, I suppose. Well, so are we. Durham it is. If you want to know the way, you can come along with us.’
Companionship in misery is dear to the unsophisticated human soul; and Richard, in spite of all his father’s lessons in deportment, shrank so profoundly from this initial ordeal of the introductory visit that he was really grateful to the supercilious youth in the broad-brimmed hat for his condescending offer. Though, to be sure, if it came to that, nobody in England had a right to be either supercilious or condescending to a scion of the Plantagenets.
‘Thank you,’ he said, a little nervously. ‘This is my first visit to Oxford, and I don’t know my way about. But I suppose you’re not in for the Scholarship yourself?’ And he gazed half unconsciously at his new acquaintance’s gray tweed suit and big sombrero, which were certainly somewhat noisy for a formal visit.
The young man in the billycock interpreted the glance aright, and answered it promptly.
‘Oh, you don’t know my friend,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye and a jerk of the head towards the lad in gray tweed; ‘this is Gillingham of Rugby — otherwise known as the Born Poet. England expects every man to do his duty; but she never expects Gillingham to dress or behave like the vest of us poor common everyday mortals. And quite right, too. What’s the good of being a born poet, I should like to know, if you’ve got to mind your P’s and Q’s just like other people?’
‘Well, I’m certainly glad I’m not an Other Person,’ Gillingham responded calmly, with a nonchalant air of acknowledged superiority.
‘Other people, for the most part, are so profoundly uninteresting! But if you’re going to walk with us, let me complete the introduction my friend has begun. This is Faussett of Rugby, otherwise known as the Born Philistine. Congenitally incapable of the faintest tincture of culture himself, he regards the possession of that alien attribute by others as simply ridiculous.’ Gillingham waved his hand vaguely towards the horizon in general. ‘Disregard what he says,’ he went on, ‘as unworthy a serious person’s intelligent consideration, and dismiss him to that limbo where he finds himself most at home — among the rowdy mob of all the Gaths and Askelons!’
Dick hardly knew how to comport himself in such unwonted company. Gillingham’s manner was unlike anything else to which he had ever been accustomed. But he felt dimly aware that politeness compelled him to give his own name in return for the others’; so he faltered out somewhat feebly, ‘My name’s Plantagenet,’ and then relapsed into a timid silence.
‘Whew! How’s that for arme?’ Gillingham exclaimed, taken aback. ‘Rather high, Tom, isn’t it? Are you any relation to the late family so called, who were Kings of England?’
This was a point-blank question which Dick could hardly avoid; but he got over the thin ice warily by answering, with a smile:
‘I never heard of more than one family of Plantagenets in England.’
‘Eton, of course?’ Gillingham suggested with a languid look. ‘It must Le Eton. It was founded by an ancestor.’
To Dick himself the question of the Plantagenet pedigree was too sacred for a jest; but he saw the only way to treat the matter in the present company was by joking; so he answered with a little laugh:
‘I believe there’s no provision there for the founder’s kin, so I didn’t benefit by it. I come only from a very small country grammar school — Chiddingwick, in Surrey.’
‘Chiddingwick! Chiddingwick! Never knew there was such a place,’ Gillingham put in with crushing emphasis. And he said it with an air which showed at once so insignificant a school was wholly unworthy a Born Poet’s attention.
As for the Philistine, he laughed.
‘Well, which are you going in for?’ he asked, with a careless swing of his cane: ‘The science, or the classics?’
‘Neither,’ Dick answered. ‘My line’s modern history.’
With a sudden little start, Gillingham seemed to wake up to interest. ‘So’s mine,’ he put in, looking extremely wise. ‘It’s the one subject now taught at our existing Universities that a creature with a soul — immortal or otherwise — would be justified in bothering his head about for one moment. Classics and ‘mathematics! oh, fiddlesticks! shade of Shelley, my gorge rises at them!’
‘You won’t have any chance against Gillingham, though, Faussett interposed with profound conviction. ‘He’s a fearful dab at history! You never knew such a howler. He’s read pretty well everything that’s ever been written in it from the earliest ages to the present time. Herodotus and York Powell alike at his finger-ends! We consider at Rugby that a man’s got to get up uncommon early if he wants to take a rise out of Trevor Gillingham.’
‘I’m sorry for that,’ Dick answered quite earnestly, astonished, now he stood face to face with these men of the world, at his own presumption in venturing even to try his luck against them. ‘For I can’t have many shots at Scholarships myself; and, unless I get one, I can’t afford to come up at all to the University.’
His very pride made him confess this much to his new friends at once, for he didn’t wish to seem as if he made their acquaintance under false pretences.
‘Oh, for my part, I don’t care twopence about the coin,’ Gillingham replied with lordly indifference, cocking his hat yet a trifle more one-sidedly than ever. ‘Only, the commoner’s gown, you know, is such, an inartistic monstrosity! I couldn’t bear to wear it! And if one goes to a college at all, one likes to feel one goes on the very best possible footing, as a member of the foundation, and not as a mere outsider, admitted on sufferance.’
It made poor Dick’s mouth water to hear the fellow talk so. What a shame these rich men — mere nouveaux riches, too, by the side of a Plantagenet — should come in like this, and take for pure honour and glory the coveted allowance that other men need as bare provision for their career at the University! He thought it quite unjustifiable. So he walked along in silence the rest of the way to the college gate, while Gillingham and Faussett, schoolboys out of school, continued to talk and chaff and swing their cherry canes in unconcerned good-humour. It was evident the ceremony meant very little to them, which to him meant more than he cared even to acknowledge. Faussett, indeed, had no expectation of a scholarship for himself at all. He went in for it for form’s sake, at his father’s desire— ‘just to satisfy the governor’ — and in hopes it might secure him an offer of rooms from the college authorities.
The first sight of the walls and outer gate of Durham impressed and overawed Dick Plantagenet not a little. To boys brought up in one of our great public schools, indeed, the aspect of Magdalen or Merton or Oriel has in it nothing of the awesome or appalling. It’s only the same old familiar quads on a larger scale over again. But to lads whose whole ideas have been formed from the first at a small country grammar school, the earliest glimpse of University life is something almost terrifying. Richard looked up at the big gate, with its sculptured saints in shrine-like niches, and then beyond again at the great quadrangle with its huge chapel window and its ivy-covered hall, and wondered to himself how he could ever have dreamt of trying to force himself in among so much unwonted splendour. A few lazy undergraduates, great overgrown schoolboys, were lounging about the quad in very careless attitudes. Some were in flannels, bound for the cricket-field or the tennis-courts; others, who were boating men, stood endued in most gorgeous many-coloured blazers. Dick regarded them with awe as dreadfully grand young gentlemen, and trembled to fancy what they would say or think of his carefully-kept black coat, rather shiny at the seams, and his well-brushed hat preserved over from last season. His heart sank within him at the novelty of his surroundings. But just at that moment, in the very nick of time, he raised his eyes by accident, and caught sight — of what? Why the Plantagenet leopards, three deep, upon the façade of the gatehouse. At view of those familiar beasts, the cognisance of his ancestors, he plucked up courage again; after all, he was a Plantagenet, and a member of his own house had founded and endowed that lordly pile he half shrank from entering.
Gillingham saw where his eyes wandered, and half read his unspoken thought. ‘Ah, the family arms!’ he said, laughing a quick little laugh.
‘You’re to the manner born here. If any preference is shown to founder’s kin, you ought to beat us all at this shop, Plantagenet!’ And he passed under the big gateway with the lordly tread of the rich man’s son, who walks this world without one pang of passing dread at that ubiquitous and unsocial British notice, ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted.’
Dick followed him, trembling, into the large paved quad, and up the stone steps of the Dean’s staircase, and quivered visibly to Faussett’s naked eye as they were all three ushered into the great man’s presence. The room was panelled, after Clarence’s own heart: severe engravings from early Italian masters alone relieved the monotony of its old wooden wainscots.
A servant announced their names. The Dean, a precise-looking person in most clerical dress, sealed at a little oak table all littered with papers, turned listlessly round in his swinging chair to receive them. ‘Mr. Gillingham of Rugby,’ he said, focussing his eye-glass on the credentials of respectability which the Born Poet presented to him. ‘Oh, yes, that’s all right. Sixth Form — h’m, h’m. Your headmaster was so kind as to write to me about you. I’m very glad to see you at Barham, I’m sure, Mr. Gillingham; hope we may number you among ourselves before long. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting your father once — I think it was at Athens. Or no, the Piræus. Sir Bernard was good enough to use his influence in securing me an escort from the Greek Government for my explorations in Boetia. Country very much disturbed; soldiers absolutely necessary. These papers are quite satisfactory, of course; h’m, h’m! highly satisfactory. Your Head tells me you write verses, too. Well, well, we shall see. You’ll go in for the Newdigate. The Keats of the future!’
‘We call him the Born Poet at Rugby, sir,’ Paussett put in, somewhat mischievously.
‘And you’re going in for the modern history examination?’ the Dean said, smiling, but otherwise not heeding the cheeky interruption. ‘Well, history will be flattered.’ He readjusted his eyeglass. ‘Mr. Faussett: Rugby, too, I believe? H’m; h’m; well, your credentials are respectable — decidedly respectable, though by no means brilliant. You’ve a brother at Christ Church, I understand. Ah, yes; exactly. You take up classics. Quite so. — And now for you, sir. Let me see.’ He dropped his eyeglass, and stared hard at the letter Richard laid before him. ‘Mr. — er — Plantagenet, of — what is it? — oh, I see — Chiddingwick Grammar School. Chiddingwick, Chiddingwick? H’m? h’m? never heard of it. Eh? What’s that? In Yorkshire, is it? Oh, ah, in Surrey; exactly; quite so. You’re a candidate for the History Scholarship, it seems. Well, the name Plantagenet’s not unknown in history. That’ll do, Mr. Plantagenet; you can go. Good-morning. Examination begins in hall to-morrow at ten o’clock punctually. — Mr. Gillingham, will you and our friend lunch with me on Friday at half-past one? No engagement? Most fortunate.’ And with a glance at the papers still scattered about his desk, he dismissed them silently.
