CHAPTER X. MR. PLANTAGENET LIVES AGAIN.
Outside college that same afternoon Trevor Gillingham, in a loud check suit, lounged lazily by the big front gate—on the prowl, as he phrased it himself, for an agreeable companion. For the Born Poet was by nature a gregarious animal, and hated to do anything alone, if a comrade could be found for him. But being a person of expansive mind, ever ready to pick up hints from all and sundry, he preferred to hook himself on by pure chance to the first stray comer, a process which contributed an agreeable dramatic variety to the course of his acquaintanceships. He loved deliberately to survey the kaleidoscope of life, and to try it anew in ever-varying combinations.
Now, the first man who emerged from the big gate that afternoon happened, as luck would have it, to be Richard Plantagenet, in his striped college blazer, on his way to the barges. Gillingham took his arm at once, as if they were boon companions.
'Are you engaged this afternoon?' he inquired with quite friendly interest. 'Because, if not, I should so much like the advantage of your advice and assistance. My governor's coming up next week for a few days to Oxford, and he wants some rooms—nice rooms to entertain in. He won't go to the Randolph—banal, very, don't you know—because he'll want to see friends a good deal. He's convivial, the governor; and he'd like a place where they'd be able to cook a decent dinner. Now, Edward Street would do, I should think. First-rate rooms in Edward Street. Can you come round and help me?'
He said it with an amount of empressement that was really flattering. Now, Dick had nothing particular to do that afternoon, though he had been bound for the river; but he always liked a stroll with that brilliant Gillingham, whom he had never ceased to admire as a creature from another social sphere—a cross between Lord Byron and the Admirable Crichton. So he put off his row, and walked round to Edward Street, the most fashionable quarter for high-class lodgings to be found in Oxford. Sir Bernard, it seemed, had just returned to England for a few short weeks from his Roumanian mission, and was anxious to get decent rooms, his son said—'the sort of rooms, don't you know, where one can dine one's women folk, for he knows all the dons' families.' They looked at half a dozen sets, all in the best houses, and Gillingham finally selected a suite at ten guineas. Dick opened his eyes with astonishment at that lordly figure: he never really knew till then one could pay so much for lodgings. But he concealed his surprise from the Born Poet, his own pride having early taught him that great lesson in life of nil admirari, which is far more necessary to social salvation in snob-ridden England than ever it could have been in the Rome of the Cæsars.
On their way back to college, after a stroll round the meadows, they met a very small telegraph boy at the doors of Durham.
'Message for you, sir,' the porter said, touching his hat to Dick; and in great doubt and trepidation, for to him a telegram was a most rare event, Dick took it and opened it.
His face flushed crimson as he read the contents; but he saw in a second the only way out of it was to put the best face on things.
'Why, my father's coming up, too!' he said, turning round to Gillingham. 'He'll arrive tomorrow. I—I must go this moment and hunt up some rooms for him. My sister doesn't say by what train he's coming; but he evidently means to stay, from what she tells me.'
'One good turn deserves another,' Gillingham drawled out carelessly. 'I don't mind going round with you and having another hunt. I should think that second set we saw round the corner would just about suit him.'
The second set had been rated at seven guineas a week. Dick was weak enough to colour again.
'Oh no,' he answered hurriedly. 'I—I'd prefer to go alone. Of course, I shall want some much cheaper place than that. I think I can get the kind of thing I require in Grove Street.'
'As you will,' Gillingham answered lightly, nodding a brisk farewell, and turning back into quad. 'Far be it from me to inflict my company unwillingly on any gentleman anywhere. I'm all for Auberon Herbert and pure individualism. I say you, Faussett, here's a game;' and he walked mysteriously round the corner by the Warden's Lodgings. He dropped his voice to a whisper: 'The Head of the Plantagenets is coming up tomorrow to visit the Prince of the Blood—fact! I give you my word for it. So we'll have an opportunity at last of finding out who the dickens the fellow is, and where on earth he inherited the proud name of Plantagenet from.'
'There were some Plantagenets at Leeds—no; I think it was Sheffield,' Faussett put in, trying to remember. 'Somebody was saying to me the other day this man might be related to them. The family's extinct, and left a lot of money.'
'Then they can't have anything to do with our Prince of the Blood,' Gillingham answered carelessly; 'for he isn't a bit extinct, but alive and kicking: and he hasn't got a crooked sixpence in the world to bless himself with. He lives on cold tea and Huntley and Palmer's biscuits. But he's not a bad sort, either, when you come to know him; but you've got to know him first, as the poet observes: and he's really a fearful swell at the history of the Plantagenets.'
Dick passed a troubled night. Terrible possibilities loomed vague before him. Next day he was down at the first two trains by which he thought it at all possible his father might arrive; and his vigilance was rewarded by finding Mr. Plantagenet delivered by the second. The Head of the House was considerably surprised, and not a little disappointed, when he saw his son and heir awaiting him on the platform.
'What, you here, Dick!' he cried. 'Why, I wanted to surprise you. I intended to take my modest room for the night at the same hotel at which you stopped—the Saracen's Head, if I recollect the name aright—and then to drop in upon you quite unexpectedly about lunch-time.'
'Maud telegraphed to me that you were coming, father,' Dick answered, taking his hand, it must be acknowledged, a trifle less warmly than filial feeling might have dictated. Then his face grew fiery red. 'But I've engaged rooms for you,' he went on, 'not at an inn, on purpose. I hope, father, for your own sake, as well as for mine, while you're here in Oxford you won't even so much as enter one.'
It was a hard thing to have to say; but, for very shame's sake, Dick felt he must muster up courage to say it.
As for Mr. Plantagenet himself, poor old sot that he was, a touch of manly pride brought the colour just for once to his own swollen cheek.
'I hope, Richard,' he said, drawing himself up very erect—for he had a fine carriage still, in spite of all his degradation—'I hope I have sufficient sense of what becomes a gentleman, in a society of gentlemen, to think of doing anything that would I disgrace myself, or disgrace my son, or disgrace my name, or my literary reputation—which must be well known to many students of English literature in this University—by any unbecoming act of any description. And I take it hardly, Richard, that my eldest son, for whom I have made such sacrifices'—Mr. Plantagenet had used that phrase so often already in the parlour of the White Horse that he had almost come by this time to believe himself there was really some truth in it—'should greet me with such marked distrust on the very outset of a visit to which I had looked forward with so much pride and pleasure.'
It was quite a dignified speech for Mr. Plan-tagenet. Dick's, heart was touched by it.
'I beg your pardon, father,' he replied in a very low tone. 'I'm sorry if I've hurt you. But I meant no rudeness. I've engaged pleasant lodgings for you in a very nice street, and I'm sure I'll do everything in my power to make your visit a happy one.'
As he spoke he almost believed his father would rise for once to the height of the circumstances, and behave himself circumspectly with decorum and dignity during his few days at Oxford.
To do Mr. Plantagenet justice, indeed, he tried very hard to keep straight for once, and during all his stay he never even entered the doors of a hotel or public-house. Nay, more; in Dick's own rooms, as Dick noticed with pleasure, he was circumspect in his drinking. It flattered his vanity and his social pretensions to be introduced to his son's friends and to walk at his ease through the grounds of the college. Once more for a day or two Edmund Plantagenet felt himself a gentleman among gentlemen.
Dick kept as close to him as possible, except at lecture hours; and then, as far as he could, he handed him over to the friendly care of Gillespie, who mounted guard in turn, and seemed to enter silently into the spirit of the situation. As much as possible, on the other hand, Dick avoided for those days Gillingham and Faussett's set, whose only wish, he felt sure, would be to draw his father into wild talk about the Plantagenet pedigree—a subject which Dick himself, in spite of his profound faith, had the good sense to keep always most sedulously in the background.
For the first three days Dick was enabled to write nightly and report to Maud that so far all went well, and there were no signs of a catastrophe. But on the fourth day, as ill-luck would have it, Gillingham came round to Faussett's rooms full of a chance discovery he had that moment lighted upon.
'Why, who'd ever believe it?' he cried, all agog. 'This man Plantagenet, who's come up to see his son—the Prince of the Blood—is a decayed writer, a man of letters of the Alaric Watts and Leigh Hunt period, not unheard of in his day as an inflated essayist. I know a lot of his stuff by heart—Hazlitt-and-water sort of style; De Quincey gone mad, with a touch of Bulwer. Learnt it when I was a boy, and we lived at Constantinople. He's the man who used to gush under the name of Barry Neville!'
'How did you find it out?' Faussett inquired, all eagerness.
'Why, I happened to turn out a “Dictionary of Pseudonyms” at the Union just now, in search of somebody else; and there the name Plantagenet caught my eye by chance. So of course I read, and, looking closer, I found this fact about the old man and his origin. It's extremely interesting. So, to make quite sure, I boarded Plantagenet five minutes ago with the point-blank question. “Hullo, Prince,” said I, “I see your father's Barry Neville, the writer.” He coloured up to his eyes, as he does—it's a charming girlish trick of his; but he admitted the impeachment. There! he's crossing the quad now. I wonder what the dickens he's done with his governor!'
'I'll run up to his rooms and see,' Faussett answered, laughing. 'He keeps the old fellow pretty close—in cotton wool, so to speak. Won't trust him out alone, and sets Gillespie to watch him. But an Exeter man tells me he's seen the same figure down at a place called Chiddingwick, where he lives, in Surrey; and according to him, he's a rare old buffer. I'll go and make his acquaintance, now his R'yal Highness has gone off unattended to lecture; we'll have some sport out of him.'
And he disappeared, brimming over, up the steps of the New Buildings.
All that afternoon, in fact, Richard noticed for himself that some change had come over his father's spirit. Mr. Plantagenet was more silent, and yet even more grandiose and regal than ever. He hadn't been drinking, thank Heaven—not quite so bad as that, for Dick knew only too well the signs of drink in his father's face and his father's actions; but he had altered in demeanour, somehow, and was puffed up with personal dignity even more markedly than usual. He sat in, and talked a great deal about the grand days of his youth, and he dwelt so much upon the past glories of Lady Postlethwaite's salon and the people he used to meet there that Dick began to wonder what on earth it portended.
'You'll come round to my rooms, father, after Hall?' he asked at last, as Mr. Plantagenet rose to leave just before evening chapel. 'Gillespie'll be here, and one or two other fellows.'
Mr. Plantagenet smiled dubiously.
'No, no, my boy,' he answered in his lightest and airiest manner. 'You must excuse me. This evening, you must really excuse me. To tell you the truth, Richard'—with profound importance—'I have an engagement elsewhere.'
'An engagement, father! You have an engagement! And in Oxford, too,' Dick faltered out. 'Why, how on earth can you have managed to pick up an engagement?'
Mr. Plantagenet drew himself up as he was wont to do for the beginning of a quadrille, and, assuming an air of offended dignity, replied with much hauteur:
'I am not in the habit, Richard, of accounting for my engagements, good, bad, or indifferent, to my own children. I am of age, I fancy. Finding myself here at Oxford in a congenial society—in the society to which I may venture to say I was brought up, and of which, but for unfortunate circumstances, I ought always to have made a brilliant member—finding myself here in my natural surroundings, I repeat, I have, of course, picked up, as you coarsely put it, a few private acquaintances on my own account. I'm not so entirely dependent as you suppose upon you, Richard, for my introduction to Oxford society. My own personal qualities and characteristics, I hope, go a little way, at least, towards securing me respect and consideration in whatever social surroundings I may happen to be mixing.'
And Mr. Plantagenet shook out a clean white cambric pocket-handkerchief ostentatiously, to wipe his eyes, in which a slight dew was supposed to have insensibly collected at the thought of Richard's unfilial depreciation of his qualities and opportunities.
'I'm sorry I've offended you, father,' Dick answered hastily. 'I'm sure I didn't mean to. But I do hope—I do hope—if you'll allow me to say so, you're not going round to spend the evening—at any other undergraduate's rooms—not at Gillingham's or Faussett's.'
Mr. Plantagenet shuffled uneasily: in point of fact, he looked very much as he had been wont to look in days gone by, when the landlady at the White Horse inquired of him now and again how soon he intended to settle his little account for brandy-and-sodas.
'I choose my own acquaintances, Richard,' he answered, with as much dignity as he could easily command. I don't permit myself to be dictated to in matters like this by my own children. Your neighbour Mr. Faussett appears to me a very intelligent and gentlemanly young man: a young man such as I was accustomed to associate with myself in my own early days, before I married your poor dear mother: not like your set, Richard, who are far from being what I myself consider thoroughly gentlemanly. Mere professional young men, your set, my dear boy: very worthy, no doubt, and hard-working, and respectable, like this excellent Gillespie; but not with that cachet, that indefinable something, that invisible hall-mark of true blood and breeding, that I observe with pleasure in your neighbour Faussett. It's not your fault, my poor boy: I recognise freely that it's not your fault. You take after your mother. She's a dear good soul, your mother'—pocket-handkerchief lightly applied again—'but she's not a Plantagenet, Richard: she's not a Planta-genet.'
And with this parting shot neatly delivered point-blank at Dick's crimson face, the offended father sailed majestically out of the room and strode down the staircase.
Dick's cheek was hot and red with mingled pride and annoyance; but he answered nothing. Far be it from him to correct or rebuke by word or deed the living Head of the House of Plantagenet.
'I hope to God,' he thought to himself piteously, 'Faussett hasn't asked him on purpose to try and make an exhibition of him. But what on earth else can he have wanted to ask him for, I wonder?'
At that very same moment Faussett was stopping Trevor Gillingham in the Chapel Quad with a characteristic invitation for a wine-party that evening.
'Drop in and have a glass of claret with me after Hall, Gillingham,' he said, laughing. 'I've got a guest coming to-night. I've asked Plan-tagenet's father round to my rooms at eight. He'll be in splendid form. He's awfully amusing when he talks at his ease, I'm told. Do come and give us one of your rousing recitations. I want to make things as lively as I can, you know.'
Gillingham smiled the tolerant smile of the Born Poet.
'All right, my dear boy,' he answered. 'I'll come. It'll be stock-in-trade to me, no doubt, for an unborn drama. Though Plantagenet's not half a bad sort of fellow, after all, when you come to know him, in spite of his smugging. Still, I'll come, and look on: an experience, of course, is always an experience. The poet's life must necessarily be made up of infinite experiences. Do you think Shakespeare always kept to the beaten path of humanity? A poet can't afford it. He must see some good—of a sort—in everything; for he must see in it at least material for a tragedy or a comedy.'
With which comfortable assurance to salve his poetical conscience the Born Bard strolled off, in cap and gown, with an easy lounging gait, to evening chapel.
CHAPTER XI. A TRAGEDY OR A COMEDY?
Mr. Plantagenet for a song! Mr. Plantagenet for a song! Hurrah for the Plantagenet!'
The table rang with the knocking of knuckles and the low cries of half-tipsy boys as the half-tipsy old man rose solemnly before them, and proceeded to deliver himself in his earliest style of his famous carol of 'Bet, the Bagman's Daughter.' He was certainly in excellent feather. Standing tall and erect, with the enlivenment of the wine to support him for the moment; all the creases smoothed out of his back, and half the wrinkles out of his brow; even his coarse, bloated face softened a little by the unusual society in which he found himself, Mr. Plantagenet sang his song as he had never sung it at the White Horse at Chiddingwick, with great verve, go, and vigour. He half blushed once or twice—at least, he would have blushed if his cheeks were capable of getting much redder—when he came to the most doubtful verses of that very doubtful composition; but the lads beside him only clapped the harder, and cried, 'Bravo!' 'Jolly good song!' and 'Well done, Mr. Plantagenet!' so he kept through bravely to the very end, singing as he had never sung before since he was a promising young man of eight-and-twenty, the lion of Lady Postlethwaite's delightful entertainments.
As he sat down a perfect chorus of applause rent the air, and Faussett, anxious not to let so good an opportunity slip by, took occasion to fill Mr. Plan-tagenet's glass twice over in succession: once during the course of the boisterous song, and once at the end to reward his efforts.
The old man had been unusually circumspect, for him, at first, for he vaguely suspected in his own mind that Faussett might have asked him there on purpose to make him drunk; and though there was nothing he liked better than an opportunity of attaining that supreme end of his existence at somebody else's expense, he had still some faint sense of self-respect left, lingering somewhere in some unsuspected back corner of his poor old ruined personality, which made him loath to exhibit his shame and degradation before so many well-bred and gentlemanly young Oxonians. But as time wore on, and the lads applauded all his jokes and songs and stories to the echo, Mr. Plantagenet's heart began by degrees to soften. He was wronging these ingenuous and eminently companionable young fellows. He was over-suspicious in supposing they wanted to make fun of him or to get fun out of him. They had been naturally attracted and pleased by his marked social qualities and characteristics. They recognised in him, under all disguises of capricious fortune, a gentleman and a Plantagenet. He helped himself complacently to another glass of sherry. He held up the golden liquid and glanced askance at the light through it, then he took a delicate sip and rolled it on his palate appreciatively.
It was not very good sherry. An Oxford winemerchant's thirty-six shilling stuff (for undergraduate consumption) can hardly be regarded as a prime brand of Spanish vintage; but it was, at least, much better than Mr. Plantagenet had been in the habit of tasting for many years past, and perhaps his palate was hardly capable any longer of distinguishing between the nicer flavours of hocks or clarets. He put his glass down with rising enthusiasm.
'Excellent Amontillado!' he said, pursing up his lips with the air of a distinguished connoisseur. 'Ex-cellent Amontillado! It's a very long time since I tasted any better.'
Which was perfectly true, as far as it went, though not exactly in the nature of a high testimonial to the character of the wine.
Now, nothing pleases a boy of twenty, posing as a man, so much as to praise his port and sherry. Knowing nothing about the subject himself, and inwardly conscious of his own exceeding ignorance, he accepts the verdict of anybody who ventures upon having an opinion with the same easy readiness as the crowd at the Academy accepts the judgment of anyone present who says aloud, with dogmatic certainty, that any picture in the place is well or ill painted.
'It is good sherry,' Faussett repeated, much mollified. 'Have another glass!'
Mr. Plantagenet assented, and leaned back in an easy-chair as being the safest place from which to deliver at ease his aesthetic judgments for the remainder of that evening. For the wine-party was beginning now to arrive at the boisterous stage. There were more songs to follow, not all of them printable; and there was loud, dull laughter, and there was childish pulling of bonbon crackers, and still more childish shying of oranges at one another's heads across the centre table. The fun was waxing fast and furious. Mr. Plantagenet at the same time was waxing hilarious.
'Gentlemen,' he said, holding his glass a little obliquely in his right hand, and eyeing it with his head on one side in a very doubtful attitude—'Gentlemen.' And at that formal beginning a hush of expectation fell upon the flushed faces of the noisy lads, ready to laugh at the drunken old man who might have been the father of any one among them.
'Hush, hush, there! Mr. Plantagenet for a speech!' Faussett shouted aloud, drumming his glass on the table.
'Hear, hear!' Gillingham cried, echoing the appeal heartily. 'The Plantagenet for a speech! Give us a speech, Mr. Plantagenet!'
Gillingham was a great deal soberer than any of the others, but he was anxious to make notes internally of this singular phenomenon. The human intellect utterly sunk and degraded by wine and debauchery forms a psychological study well worthy the Born Poet's most attentive consideration. He may need it some day for a Lear or an Othello.
Mr. Plantagenet struggled up manfully upon his shaky legs. 'Gentlemen,' he murmured, in a voice a little thick, to be sure, with drinking, but still preserving that exquisitely clear articulation for which Edmund Plantagenet had always been famous—'Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to find myself at last, after a long interval of comparative eclipse, in such exceedingly congenial and delightful society. In fact, I may say in the society of my equals—yes, gentlemen, of my equals. I am not proud; I will put it simply “of my equals.” Time was, 'tis true, when the name of Plantagenet would, perhaps, have implied something more than mere equality—but I pass that. To insist upon the former greatness and distinction of one's family is as ill-bred and obtrusive as it is really superfluous. But since we here this evening have now sunk into our anecdotage, I will venture to narrate to you a little anecdote'— here Mr. Plantagenet swayed uneasily from one side to the other, and Gillingham, ever watchful, propped him up from behind with much anxious show of solicitous politeness—'a little anecdote of a member of my own kith and kin, with whose name you are all doubtless well acquainted. My late relative, Edward Plantagenet, the Black Prince——'
At the mention of this incongruous association, most seriously delivered, such a sudden burst of unanimous laughter broke at once from the whole roomful of unruly boys that Mr. Plantagenet, taken aback, felt himself quite unable to continue his family reminiscences. The roar of amusement stunned and half sobered him. He drew his hand across his forehead with a reflective air, steadied himself on his legs, and, shading his eyes with his hand, looked across the table with a frown at the laughing conspirators. Then a light seemed to dawn upon him spasmodically for a moment; the next, again, it had faded away. He forgot entirely the thread of his story, gazed around him impotently with a bland smile of wonder, and sank back into his chair at last with the offended dignity of hopeless drunkenness. It was a painful and horrible sight. To hide his confusion he filled his glass up once more with the profoundest solemnity, tossed it off at a gulp to prevent spilling it, and glanced round yet again upon the tittering company, as if he expected another round of generous applause to follow his efforts.
'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 his 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.