Blood Royal: A Novel

Mary’s pace by this time had become almost unladylike, so fast was she walking. Still, just to break the awkward silence which followed Dick’s last words, she felt compelled to say something. ‘You’ll meet plenty of girls, too, I expect,’ she interposed nervously.

‘Perhaps; but they won’t be you,’ Dick blurted out with a timid gasp, gazing straight into her eyes; and then recoiled, aghast, at his own exceeding temerity.

Mary blushed again and cast down her eyes. ‘Don’t let me take you out of your way any farther,’ she said after another short pause, just to cover her confusion. ‘I really must get back now. Mrs. Tradescant’ll be so angry.’

‘Oh no; you can’t go just yet!’ Dick cried, growing desperate, and standing half across the path, with a man’s masterful eagerness. ‘Now I’ve once begun with it, I must say my say out to you. Miss Tudor, that very first day I ever saw you, I thought a great deal of you. You could tell I did by the mere fact that I took the trouble to make such a fool of myself over that unhappy book-cover. But the more I’ve seen of you, the better I’ve liked you. Liked you, oh, so much I can hardly tell you! And when I went up to Oxford about this Scholarship, which has given me a start in life, I thought about you so often that I really believe I owe my success in great part to you. Now, what I want to say before I go’ – he paused and hesitated; it was so hard to word it – ‘what I want to say’s just this. Perhaps you’ll think it presumptuous of me; but do you feel, if I get on, and recover the place in the world that belongs by right to my family – do you feel as if there’s any chance you might ever be able to care for me?’

He jerked it out, all trembling. Mary trembled herself, and hardly knew what to answer; for though she liked the young man very much – more than any other young man she’d ever yet met – she hadn’t thought of him to herself in this light exactly – at least, not very often. So she stood for a moment in the corner of the path by that bend in the field where the hedge hides and shelters one, and replied diplomatically, with sound feminine common-sense, though with a quiver in her voice:

‘Don’t you think, Mr. Plantagenet, it’s a little bit premature for you to talk of these things when you’re only just going up to Oxford? For your own sake, you know, and your family’s too, you ought to leave yourself as free and untrammelled as possible: you oughtn’t to burden yourself beforehand with uncertainties and complications.’

Dick looked at her half reproachfully. ‘Oh, Miss Tudor!’ he cried, drawing back quite seriously, ‘I wouldn’t allow anybody else in the world to call you a complication.’

He said it so gravely that Mary laughed outright in spite of herself. But Dick was very much in earnest, for all that. ‘I mean it, though,’ he went on, hardly smiling to himself. ‘I mean it, most literally. I want you to tell me, before I go up to Oxford, there’s still some chance, some little chance in the future for me. Or at any rate I want to let you know what I feel, so that – well, so that if anybody else should speak to you meanwhile, you will remember at least – and – ’

He broke off suddenly. ‘Oh, Miss Tudor,’ he cried once more, looking down at her with a mutely appealing look, ‘it means so much to me!’

‘You’re very young, you know,’ Mary answered, with a good woman’s subterfuge, half to gain time. ‘I think it would be very foolish, both for you and me, to tie ourselves down at our present ages. And besides, Mr. Plantagenet’ – she played with her parasol a moment – ‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I’m not quite sure – whether or not I care for you.’

There was a tremor in her voice that made her words mean less than they seemed to mean; but she felt it too. This was all so sudden. Nevertheless, Dick seized her hand. She tried to withdraw it, but couldn’t. Then he began in eager tones to pour forth his full heart to her. He knew he had no right to ask, but he couldn’t bear to go away and leave the chance of winning her open to some other fellow. It must be for a very long time, of course; but, still, he could work better if he knew he was working for her. He didn’t want her to say ‘Yes’; he only wanted her not quite to say ‘No’ outright to him. This, and much else, he uttered from his heart with rapidly developing eloquence. He was so glad he’d met her, for he couldn’t have left Chiddingwick without at least having spoken to her.

To all which Mary, with downcast eyes, very doubtful – though she liked him – whether it was quite right for her to talk in this strain at all to the dancing-master’s son, replied demurely that ‘twas all very premature, and that she didn’t feel able to give him any answer of any sort, either positive or negative, till they had both of them had more time to look about them.

‘And now,’ she said finally, pulling out her watch, and starting, ‘I really mustn’t stop one moment longer. I must go back at once. It’s dreadfully late. I’m sure I don’t know what Mrs. Tradescant will think of me.’

‘At least,’ Dick cried, standing half in front of her yet again, and blocking up the pathway, ‘you’ll allow me to write to you?’

Yes, Mary thought, yielding, there’d be no harm in that – no objection to his writing.

Dick gave a little sigh of heartfelt satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s something!’ he cried, much relieved. ‘That’s always something! If you’ll allow me to write to you, I shall feel at any rate you can’t quite forget me.’

And, indeed, when a girl lets a young man begin a correspondence, experience teaches me, from long observation, that other events are not unlikely to follow.

CHAPTER VIII. AT ‘OXFORD COLLEGE.’

Well, I don’t know what you fellows think, but as far as I’m concerned,’ Trevor Gillingham remarked, with an expansive wave of his delicate white hand, ‘my verdict on the Last of the Plantagenets is simply this: the Prince of the Blood has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.’

It was a fortnight later, in Faussett’s rooms in the Chapel Quad at Durham (Chapel Quad is the most fashionably expensive quarter), and a party of raw lads, who took themselves for men, all gathered round their dessert, were engaged in discussing their fellow-undergraduate. The table groaned with dried fruits and mandarin oranges. Faussett himself raised to his lips a glass of Oxford wine-merchant’s sherry – ‘our famous Amontillado as imported, thirty-six shillings the dozen’ – and observed in a tone of the severest criticism: ‘Oh, the man’s a smug; a most unmitigated smug: that’s the long and the short of it.’

Now, to be a smug is, in Oxford undergraduate circles, the unpardonable sin. It means, to stop in your own rooms and moil and toil, or to lurk and do nothing, while other men in shoals are out and enjoying themselves. It means to avoid the river and the boats; to shun the bump-supper; to decline the wine-party. Sometimes, it is true, the smug is a curmudgeon; but sometimes he is merely a poor and hard-working fellow, the sort of person whom at forty we call a man of ability.

‘Well, I won’t go quite so far as that,’ one of the other lads observed, smacking his lips with an ostentatious air of judicial candour, about equally divided between Dick and the claret. ‘I won’t quite condemn him as a smug, unheard. But it’s certainly odd he shouldn’t join the wine-club.’

He was a second-year man, the speaker, one Westall by name, who had rowed in the Torpids; and as the rest were mostly freshmen of that term, his opinion naturally carried weight with all except Gillingham. He, indeed, as a Born Poet, was of course allowed a little more license in such matters than his even Christians.

‘Up till now,’ Faussett put in, with a candid air of historical inquiry, ‘you see every Durham man has always as a matter of course subscribed to the wine-club. Senior men tell me they never knew an exception.’

Gillingham looked up from his easy-chair with a superior smile. ‘I don’t object to his not joining it,’ he said, with a curl of the cultured lip, for the Born Poet of course represented culture in this scratch collection of ardent young Philistines; ‘but why, in the name of goodness, didn’t he say outright like a man he couldn’t afford it? It’s the base hypocrisy of his putting his refusal upon moral grounds, and calling himself a total abstainer, that sets my back up. If a man’s poor in this world’s goods, and can’t afford to drink a decent wine, in heaven’s name let him say so; but don’t let him go snuffling about, pretending he doesn’t care for it, or he doesn’t want it, or he doesn’t like it, or he wouldn’t take it if he could get it. I call that foolish and degrading, as well as unmanly. Even Shakespeare himself used to frequent the Mermaid tavern. Why, where would all our poetry be, I should like to know, if it weren’t for Bacchus? Bacchus, ever fair and ever young? “War, he sang, is toil and trouble; Honour but an empty bubble; Never ending, still beginning; Fighting still, and still destroying; If the world be worth thy winning, Think, oh, think it worth enjoying.”’

And Gillingham closed his eyes ecstatically as he spoke, and took another sip at the thirty-six Amontillado, in a rapture of divine poesy.

‘Hear, hear!’ Faussett cried, clapping his hands with delight. ‘The Born Poet for a song! The Born Poet for a recitation! You men should just hear him spout “Alexander’s Feast.” It’s a thing to remember! He’s famous as a spouter, don’t you know, at Rugby. Why, he’s got half the British poets or more by heart, and a quarter of the prose authors. He can speak whole pages. But “Alexander’s Feast” is the thing he does the very best of all. Whenever he recites it he brings the house down.’

‘Respect for an ancient and picturesque seat of learning prevents me from bringing down the roof of Durham College, then,’ Gillingham answered lightly, with a slight sneer for his friend’s boyish enthusiasm. ‘Besides, my dear boy, you wander from the subject. When the French farmer asked his barn-door fowls to decide with what sauce they would wish to be eaten, they held a meeting of their own in the barton-yard, and sent their spokesman to say, “If you please, M. le Propriétaire, we very much prefer not to be eaten.”

“Mes amis,” said the farmer, “vous vous écartez de la question.” And that’s your case, Faussett. The business before the house is the moral turpitude and mental obliquity of the man Plantagenet, who refuses – as he says, on conscientious grounds – to join the college wine-club. Now, I take that as an insult to a society of gentlemen.’

‘What a lark it would be,’ Faussett cried, ‘if we were to get him up here just now, offer him some wine, to which he pretends he has a conscientious objection – unless somebody else pays for it – make him drink success to the cause of total abstinence, keep filling up his glass till we make him dead drunk, and then set him at the window in a paper cap to sing “John Barleycorn.”’

Gillingham’s thin lip curled visibly. ‘Your humour, my dear boy,’ he said, patting Faussett on the back, ‘is English – English – essentially English. It reminds me of Gilray. It lacks point and fineness. Your fun is like your neckties – loud, too loud! You must cultivate your mind (if any) by a diligent study of the best French models. I would recommend, for my part, as an efficient antidote, a chapter of De Maupassant and an ode of François Coppée’s every night and morning.’

‘But if Plantagenet’s poor,’ one more tolerant lad put in apologetically, ‘it’s natural enough, after all, he shouldn’t want to join the club. It’s precious expensive, you know, Gillingham. It runs into money.’

The Born Poet was all sweet reasonableness.

‘To be poor, my dear Matthews,’ he said, with a charming smile, turning round to the objector, ‘as Beau Brummell remarked about a rent in one’s coat, is an accident that may happen to any gentleman any day; but a patch, you must recognise, is premeditated poverty. The man Plan-tagenet may be as poor as he chooses, so far as I’m concerned; I approve of his being poor. What so picturesque, so affecting, so poetical, indeed, as honest poverty? But to pretend he doesn’t care for wine – that’s quite another matter. There the atrocity comes in – the vulgarian atrocity. For I call such a statement nothing short of vulgar.’ He raised his glass once more, and eyed the light of the lamp through the amethystine claret with poetic appreciation. ‘Now give the hautboys breath,’ he cried, breaking out once more in a fit of fine dithyrambic inspiration; ‘he comes! he comes! Bacchus, ever fair and ever young, Drinking joys did first ordain. Bacchus’ blessings are a treasure; Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure. Rich the tr-r-reasure. Sweet the pleasure. Sweet is pleasure after pain.’

And when Gillingham said that, with his studiously unstudied air of profound afflatus, everybody in the company felt convinced at once that Plantagenet’s teetotalism, real or hypocritical, simply hadn’t got a leg left to stand upon. They turned for consolation to the Carlsbad plums and the candied cherries.

But at the very same moment, in those more modest rooms, up two pair of stairs in the Back Quad, which Dick had selected for himself as being the cheapest then vacant, the Prince of the Blood himself sat in an old stuffed chair, in a striped college boating coat, engaged in discussing his critic Gillingham in a more friendly spirit with a second-year man, who, though not a smug, was a reader and a worker, by name Gillespie, a solid Glasgow Scotchman. They had rowed together that afternoon in a canvas pair to Sandford, and now they were working in unison on a chapter or two of Aristotle.

‘For my own part,’ Dick said, ‘when I hear Gillingham talk, I’m so overwhelmed with his knowledge of life and his knowledge of history, and his extraordinary reading, that I feel quite ashamed to have carried off the Scholarship against him. I feel the examiners must surely have made a mistake, and some day they’ll find it out, and be sorry they elected me.’

‘You needn’t be afraid of that,’ Gillespie answered, smiling, and filling his pipe. ‘You lack the fine quality of a “guid conceit o’ yoursel,” Plantagenet. I’ve talked a bit with Gillingham now and again, and I don’t think very much of him. He’s not troubled that way. He’s got an extraordinary memory, and a still more extraordinary opinion of his own high merits; but I don’t see, bar those two, that there’s anything particularly brilliant or original about him. He’s a poet, of course, and he writes good verses. Every fellow can write good verses nowadays. The trick’s been published. All can raise the flower now, as Tennyson puts it, for all have got the seed. But, as far as I can judge Gillingham, his memory’s just about the best thing about him. He has a fine confused lot of undigested historical knowledge packed away in his head loose; but he hasn’t any judgment; and judgment is ability. The examiners were quite right, my dear fellow; you know less than Gillingham in a way; but you know it more surely, and you can make better use of it. His work’s showy and flashy; yours is solid and serviceable.’

And Gillespie spoke the truth. Gradually, as Dick got to see more of the Born Poet’s method, he found Gillingham out; he discovered that the great genius was essentially a poseur. He posed about everything. His rôle in life, he said himself, was to be the typical poet; and he never forgot it. He dressed the part; he acted it; he ate and drank poetically. He looked at everything from the point of view of a budding Shakespeare, with just a dash of Shelley thrown in, and a suspicion of Matthew Arnold to give modern flavour. Add a tinge of Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Ibsen, for cosmopolitan interest, and you have your bard complete. He was a spectator of the drama of human action, he loved to remark; he watched the poor creatures and the pretty creatures at their changeful game – doing, loving, and suffering. He saw in it all good material for his art, the raw stuff for future plays to astonish humanity. Meanwhile, he lay low at Durham College, Oxford, and let the undergraduate world deploy itself before him in simple Bacchic guise or Heraclean feats of strength and skill.

Dick saw more of Gillespie those first few terms than of anyone else in college. He was a thorough good fellow, Archibald Gillespie, and he had just enough of that ballast of common-sense and knowledge of the world which was a trifle lacking to the romantic country-bred lad fresh up from Chiddingwick. He helped Dick much with his work, and went much with him on the river. And Dick worked with a will at his history all that year, and pulled an oar with the best of them; though he found time, too, to coach a fellow-undergraduate going in for ‘Smalls,’ which increased his income by ten whole pounds – an incredible sum to him. When he thought of how hard it used to be to earn ten pounds at Mr. Wells’s in the High Street at Chiddingwick, no wonder Oxford seemed to him a veritable Eldorado.

In spite of hard work, however, and frequent tight places, that first term at Oxford was a genuine delight to him. Who that has known it does not look back upon his freshman year, even in middle life, with regretful enjoyment? Those long mornings in great lecture-rooms, lighted up with dim light from stained-glass windows; those golden afternoons on the gleaming river or among the fields towards Iffey; those strolls round the leafy avenues of Christ Church walks; those loitering moments in Magdalen cloisters! What lounging in a punt under the chestnuts by the Cherwell; what spurts against the stream on the river by Godstow! All, all is delightful to the merest full-blooded boy; to Richard Plantagenet’s romantic mind, stored with images of the past, ‘twas a perpetual feast of fantastic pleasure.

He wrote to Mary twice a week. He would have written every day, indeed, if Mary had allowed him; but the lady of his love more prudently remarked that Mrs. Tradescant would be tempted to inquire in that case as to the name and business of her constant correspondent: He wrote her frankly all his joys and griefs, and she in return quite as frankly sympathized with him. Boy and girl as they were, it was all very pleasant. To be sure, it was understood and arranged on both sides beforehand by the high contracting parties that these letters were to be taken as written on purely friendly grounds, and, as the lawyers say, ‘without prejudice’; still, as time went on, they grew more and more friendly, until at last it would have required the critical eye of an expert in breach-of-promise cases to distinguish them at first sight from ordinary love-letters. Indeed, just once, towards the end of term, Dick went so far as to begin one short note, ‘Dearest Mary,’ which was precisely what he always called her to himself in his own pleasant day-dreams; and then he had the temerity to justify his action in so many words by pleading the precedent of this purely mental usage. But Mary promptly put a stop to such advances by severely beginning her reply, ‘Dear Mr. Plantagenet’; though, to be sure, she somewhat spoilt the moral effect of so stern a commencement by confessing at once in the sequel that she had headed her first draught with a frank ‘Dear Dick,’ and then torn it up, after all, being ashamed to send it.

When Dick read that deliciously feminine confession, consigned in blushing ink to fair white maiden notepaper, his heart gave a jump that might have been heard in Tom Quad, and his face grew as red as Mary’s own when she penned it.

CHAPTER IX. A SUDDEN RESOLVE

Now, then, young gentlemen, choose your partners!’ Mr. Plantagenet murmured with a bland and inane smile. (‘Strike up the violin, Maud!’ aside.) ‘Bow, and fall into places. Eight bars before beginning. No, not yet, Miss Tradescant. Explain to this young lady, if you please, Miss Tudor, that she must always wait eight bars – eight bars exactly – before she begins to chasser. That’s right. Just so! Advance in couples – right, left – right, left – right, left – down the middle. Very nicely done, indeed: very nicely, very nicely. Now! – yes – that’s it. Change hands, and over again!’

A year and more had passed, and Mr. Plantagenet’s face bore distincter signs than ever of his ruling passion. It was coarse and red under the bland exterior. Maud watched him intently now on the morning of lesson days to see he didn’t slink away unobserved into the bar of the White Horse before the appointed hour for the meeting in the Assembly Rooms. Once let him cross the threshold of the inn, except to enter the big hall where he received his pupils, and all was up with him. On such occasions Maud was compelled with grief and shame to stick a notice on the door: ‘Mr. Plantagenet is indisposed to-day, and will be unable to meet his usual classes.’ Nobody else ever knew what agony those notices cost the poor shrinking girl; but on the next appointed afternoon Mr. Plantagenet would be at his place again as if nothing had happened, and would murmur plaintively, with one hand on his left breast and the other on the bow of his faithful violin:

‘My old complaint, ladies and gentlemen – my old complaint! I suffer so much from my heart. I regret I was unable to receive you on Wednesday.’ Everybody in Chiddingwick knew quite well the real nature of Mr. Plantagenet’s ‘old complaint,’ but he was an institution of the place, and everybody pretended to believe in it and to sympathize with him.

On this particular day, however, in the middle of November, Mr. Plantagenet seemed even more consequential and more dignified than usual, if such a thing were possible. He received Lady Agatha’s little girls with princely condescension. Maud, who stood by trembling, and watching him with dismay, as he fiddled with a will on his well-tried violin, wondered to herself, with a mute feeling of terror in her heart, what on earth could have put her father into such visible good humour. She didn’t discover the secret till the end of the lesson. Then Mr. Plantagenet, rising with great importance and a conscious smirk, observed in his suavest and most professional tone:

‘I am sorry to say, young ladies and gentlemen – and you, Miss Tudor – I won’t be able to give the usual lessons next Tuesday and Wednesday. The fact of the matter is, I shall be away from Chiddingwick. It doesn’t often happen that I take a holiday; but on this occasion I shall be away from Chiddingwick. Long and close attention to the duties of a harassing and wearisome task has undermined my constitution; you can sympathize with my feelings, and next week I propose to give myself a well-earned repose in order to visit my dear son at the University of Oxford.’

It was a perfect bombshell. To Maud, sitting by wearily, with her small violin clasped in her bloodless hands, the announcement came like a thunderbolt. He was going to Oxford! She turned deadly pale at once, and clutched the bow of her instrument with a spasmodic action. Mary Tudor, sitting near, noticed the pallor on her cheek, and guessed the cause of it instantly. The two girls looked up; for a second their eyes met, then Maud let hers drop suddenly. Though on that one dearest point Dick had never taken her into his confidence, Maud had guessed the whole truth during last Christmas vacation, and if anything could make the cup of her bitterness even bitterer than it was, ‘twas the thought that Dick’s friend, Dick’s future wife, perhaps, should see and understand the full depths of her misery.