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.