Mrs. Tradescant was kinder than usual. Mr. Plantagenet’s sudden death had softened her heart for the moment towards the family – perhaps even towards Maud herself, that horrid girl who committed the unpardonable offence, to a mother, of being prettier and more ladylike than her own eldest daughter. The lady of the Rectory was in the schoolroom with Mary when Ellen, the housemaid, came in with the unwonted message that Mr. Richard Plantagenet – ‘him as has gone up to college at Oxford, ma’am, has called for to see Miss Tudor.’
Mary blushed up to her eyes, and expected Mrs. Tradescant would insist upon going down and seeing Dick with her.
But Mrs. Tradescant had a woman’s inkling of what was afoot between the two young people; and now that that horrid old man was dead, and Richard his own master, she really didn’t know that it very much mattered. Young Plantagenet was an Oxford man, after all, and might go into the Church, and turn out a very good match in the end for Mary Tudor. So she only looked up and said, with a most unusual smile:
‘You’d better run down to him, dear. I dare say you’d like best to see him alone for awhile, after all that’s happened.’
Taken aback at such generosity, Mary ran down at once, still blushing violently, to Dick in the drawing-room. She hardly paused for a second at the glass on her way, just to pull her front hair straight and rub her cheek with her hand – quite needlessly – to bring up some colour.
Dick was dressed in black from head to foot, and looked even graver and more solemn than usual. He stretched out both his hands to hers as Mary entered, and took her fingers in his own with a regretful tenderness. Then he looked deep into her eyes for some seconds in silence. His heart was full to bursting. How could he ever break it to her? ‘Twas so hard to give up all his dreams for ever. At last he found words.
‘Oh, Mary,’ he cried, trembling, ‘you’ve heard of all that’s happened?’
Mary pressed his hand hard, and answered simply, with a great lump in her throat: ‘Yes, Dick dear, I’ve heard – and all these days long I’ve lived with you constantly.’
Dick sat down on the sofa and began to tell her all his story. He told her first about his father’s death and the things that had followed it; and then he went on to the more immediately practical question of what he was to do for his mother and sisters. His voice trembled as he spoke, for he was very, very fond of her; but he told her all straight out, as a Plantagenet should, without one word of the disgrace he felt it would be. He dwelt only on the absolute necessity of his doing something at once to provide for the family.
‘And under these circumstances, Mary,’ he said at last, looking down at her with some moisture in his brimming eyes. ‘I feel that my duty to you is perfectly plain and clear. I must release you unconditionally from the engagement, which, as we both know, has never existed between us.’
Mary looked at him for a moment as if she hardly took in the full meaning of his words; then, in a. very low and decided voice, she answered clearly: ‘But I don’t release you, dear Dick – and I shall never release you.’
‘But, Mary,’ Dick cried, unable to conceal his pleasure at her words, in spite of himself, ‘you mustn’t think of it, you know. It’s – it’s quite, quite impossible. In the first place, I shall never be able to marry at all now, or if ever, why, only after years and years – oh, Heaven only knows how many!’
(‘That’s nothing!’ Mary sobbed out parenthetically; ‘if necessary, I could wait a thousand years for you.’)
‘And then again,’ Dick continued, resolved not to spare himself one solitary drop in his cup of degradation, ‘it would never do for you to be engaged – to the local dancing-master. If it comes to that, indeed, I’m sure Mrs. Tradeseant wouldn’t allow it.’
With a sudden womanly impulse Mary rose all at once and flung herself, sobbing, on her lover’s bosom.
‘Oh, Dick,’ she cried – ‘dear Dick, I’m proud of you – so proud of you, no matter what you do – prouder now than ever! I think it’s just grand of you to be so ready to give up everything for your mother and sisters. You seem to me to think only of them – and of me – and not a word of yourself; and I say it’s just beautiful of you. I couldn’t be ashamed of you if you sold apples in the street. You’d always be yourself, and I couldn’t help being proud of you. And as for Mrs. Tradeseant, if she won’t let me be engaged to you, why, I’ll throw up the place and take another one, if I can get it – or else go without one. But I’m yours now, Dick, and I shall be yours for ever.’ She threw her arms round his neck, and, for the first time in her life, she raised her lips and kissed him. ‘Why, what a wretch I should be,’ she cried through her tears, ‘if I could dream of giving you up just at the very moment when you most want my help and sympathy! Dick, Dick – dear Dick, we never were engaged till now; but now we are engaged, and you won’t argue me out of it!’
Dick led her to a seat. For the next few minutes the conversation was chiefly of an inarticulate character. The type-founder’s art has no letters to represent it. Then Dick tried to speak again in the English language. (The rest had been common to the human family.)
‘This is very good of you, dearest,’ he said, holding her hand tight in his own; ‘very, very good and sweet of you! It’s just what I might have expected; though I confess, being engaged chiefly in thinking of the thing from the practical standpoint, I didn’t expect it, which was awfully dull of me. But we must be practical – practical. I must devote myself in future to my mother and sisters; and you mustn’t waste all the best of your life in waiting for me – in waiting for a man who will probably never, never be able to marry you.’
But women, thank God, are profoundly unpractical creatures! Mary looked up in his face through her tears, and made answer solemnly:
‘Oh, Dick, you don’t know how long I would wait for you! I want to tell you something, dear; to-day I feel I can tell you. I could never have told you before; I wouldn’t tell you now if it weren’t for all that has happened. Eighteen months ago, when you first spoke to me, I thought to myself: “He’s a charming young man, and I like him very much; he’s so kind and so clever; but how could I ever marry him? It wouldn’t be right; he’s the son of the dancing-master.” And now to-day, dear Dick, you darling good fellow, if you turn dancing-master yourself, or anything else in the world – if you sweep a crossing, even – I shall be proud of you still; I shall feel prouder of you by far than if you stopped there selfishly in your rooms at Oxford, and never gave a thought to your mother and sisters.’
She paused for a second and looked at him. Then once more she flung her arms round his neck and cried aloud, almost hysterically:
‘Oh, Dick, dear Dick, whatever on earth you do, I shall always love you; I shall always be proud of you!’
And when they parted that morning, Richard Plantagenet and Mary Tudor were for the first time in their lives engaged to one another.
That’s what always happens when you go to see a girl, conscientiously determined, for her sake, much against the grain, to break things off with her for ever. I have been there myself, and I know all about it.
CHAPTER XV. A WILLING PRISONER
At Oxford all that day, Mr. Archibald Gillespie, of Durham College, found himself in a very singular position indeed for an undergraduate of such unquestioned and respectable manners. For he was keeping Maud Plantagenet shut up behind a sported oak in her brother’s rooms, and clandestinely supplying her with lunch, tea and dinner.
This somewhat compromising condition of affairs in the third pair left of Back Quad New Buildings had been brought about by a pure concatenation of accidents. When Maud left Chiddingwick that morning, with nothing in her purse, she had trusted to Dick to supply her with the wherewithal for paying her way back again. But as Dick was not at home when she reached his rooms, she had been compelled to wait in for him till he returned from Chiddingwick. For the same reason she was obviously unable to supply herself with food at a hotel or restaurant. Being a Plan-tagenet, indeed, she would have been far too proud to let Gillespie suspect these facts by overt act or word of hers; but, somehow, he guessed them for himself, and soon found his suspicions confirmed by her very silence.
Now, the scouts, or college servants, have a key of the ‘oak,’ and can enter men’s rooms at any moment without warning beforehand. There was nothing for it, therefore, but for Gillespie to take Dick’s scout frankly into his confidence; which he did accordingly. Already he had forgotten his eleven o’clock lecture; Plato’s ‘Bepublic’ had gone to the wall before a pretty face; and now he went outside the door to plot still further treason, and shouted, after the primitive Oxford fashion, for the servant.
‘Look here, Robert,’ he said, as the scout came up, ‘there’s a young lady in deep mourning in Mr. Plantagenet’s rooms. She’s Mr. Plantagenet’s sister, and she’s come up to see him about this dreadful affair the other day, you understand. But he’s gone down home for the morning to Chiddingwick – they’ve crossed on the road – and he mayn’t perhaps be back again till late in the evening. Now, I can see the young lady’s got no money about her – she came away hurriedly – and I don’t like to offer her any. So I’m going to telegraph to Mr. Plantagenet to come back as soon as he can; but he can’t be here for some time yet, anyhow. Of course, the young lady must have something to eat; and I want you to help me with it. Tell the porter who she is, and that she’ll probably have to stop here till Mr. Plantagenet comes back. Under the circumstances, nobody will say anything about it. At lunch-time you must take out something quiet and nice in my name from the kitchen – chicken cutlets, and so forth – and serve it to the young lady in Mr. Plantagenet’s rooms. When Mr. Plantagenet returns he’ll see her out of college.’
As for Robert, standing by obsequious, he grinned from ear to ear at the obvious prospect of a good round tip, and undertook for his part with a very fair grace that the young lady’s needs should be properly provided for. Your scout is a person of infinite resource, the most servile of his kind; he scents tips from afar, and would sell his soul to earn one.
Even in this age of enlightenment, however, an Oxford college still retains many traits of the medieval monastery from which it sprang; women are banned in it; and ‘twould have been as much as Mr. Robert’s place was worth to serve the unknown young lady in Dick Plantagenet’s rooms without leave from headquarters. So he made a clean breast of it. Application to the Dean, however, resulted in his obtaining the necessary acquiescence; and Gillespie devoted himself through the rest of that day to making Maud as comfortable as was possible under the circumstances in her brother’s rooms till Dick’s return from Chiddingwick.
So charitably was he minded, indeed, that he hardly left her at all except at meal-times. Now, in the course of a long day’s tête-à-tête two people get to know a wonderful deal of one another, especially if they have mutually sympathetic natures; and before Dick returned that evening to set Maud at liberty, she and Gillespie felt already like old friends together.
Dick didn’t get back, as it happened, till long after Hall, and then it was too late for Maud to catch a train back that evening. The reason for the delay was simple; Dick hadn’t received Archie Gillespie’s telegram till his return from the Rectory. He had stopped there to lunch, at Mrs. Tradescant’s request, after his interview with Mary; and for Mary’s sake he thought it best to accept the invitation. So the end of it all was that Dick had to find his sister a bed under the friendly roof of a married Fellow of his college, and that before he took her round there, he, she, and Gillespie had a long chat together about the prospects of the situation.
‘Mr. Gillespie and I have been talking it over all day, Dick,’ Maud said very decidedly; ‘and we’re both of us of opinion – most distinctly of opinion – that you oughtn’t, as a duty to mother and to us, to do anything that’ll compel you to take back again the one great forward step you took in coming to Oxford. Mr. Gillespie says rightly, it’s easy enough to go down, but not by any means so easy, once you’re there, to climb up again.’
‘I ought to do whatever makes me earn an immediate income soonest, though, for all your sakes, Maud,’ Dick objected stoutly.
‘Not at all!’ Maud answered with Plantagenet decision, and with wisdom above her years, dictated no doubt by her love and pride in her brother. ‘You oughtn’t to sacrifice the future to the present.’ Then she turned to him quite sharply. ‘Did you see Mary Tudor to-day?’ she asked, regardless of Gillespie’s presence, for she considered him already as an old friend of the family.
The tell-tale colour rushed up fast into Dick’s cheek.
‘Yes, I did,’ he answered, half faltering. ‘And she behaved most nobly. She behaved as you’d expect such a girl to behave, Maud. She spoke of it quite beautifully.’
Maud drew back, triumphant. If Mary had been there, she could have thrown her thin arms round her neck and kissed her.
‘Well, and she didn’t advise you to go and settle at Chiddingwick!’ Maud cried with proud confidence.
‘She didn’t exactly advise me,’ Dick answered with some little hesitation; ‘but she acquiesced in my doing it; and she said, whatever I did, she’d always love me equally. In point of fact,’ Dick added, somewhat sheepishly, ‘we never were engaged at all before to-day; but this morning we settled it.’
Maud showed her profound disappointment, nay, almost her contempt, in her speaking face. To say the truth, it’s seldom we can any of us see anything both from our own point of view and someone else’s as well. Maud could see nothing in all this but profound degradation for Dick, and indirectly for the family, if Dick went back to Chiddingwick; while Mary had only thought how noble and devoted it was of her unselfish lover to give up everything so readily for his mother and sisters.
‘I think,’ Dick ventured to put in, since Mary’s reputation was at stake in Maud’s mind, ‘she was most – well, pleased that I should be willing to – to make this sacrifice – if I may call it so – because I thought it my duty.’
Maud flung herself on the floor at his side, and held his hand in hers passionately.
‘Oh, Dick,’ she cried, clinging to him, ‘dear Dick! she oughtn’t to have thought like that! She oughtn’t to have thought of us! She ought to have thought, as I do, of you and your future! If I, who am your sister, am so jealous for your honour, surely she, who’s the girl you mean to marry, ought to be ten times more so!’
‘So she is,’ Dick answered manfully. ‘Only, don’t you see, Maud, there are different ways of looking at it. She thinks, as I do, that it’s best and most imperative to do one’s duty first; she would give me up for herself, almost, and wait for me indefinitely, if she thought I could do better so for you and dear mother.’
Maud clung to him passionately still. For it was not to him only she clung, but also to the incarnate honour of the family. ‘Oh, Dick,’ she cried once more, ‘you mustn’t do it; you mustn’t do it; you’ll kill me if you do it! We don’t mind starving; that’s as easy as anything; but not a second time shall we draggle in the dust of the street the honour of the Plantagenets.’
They sat up late that night, and talked it all over from every side alternately. And the more they talked it over, the more did Gillespie come round to Maud’s opinion on the matter. It might be necessary for Dick to leave Oxford, indeed; though even that would be a wrench; but if he left Oxford, it would certainly be well he should take some other work – whatever work turned up – even if less well paid, that would not unclass him.
And before they separated for the night, Maud had wrung this concession at least out of her wavering brother, that he would do nothing decisive before the end of term; and that, meanwhile, he would try to find some more dignified employment in London or elsewhere. Only in the last resort, he promised her, would he return to Chiddingwick – and his father’s calling. That should be treated as the final refuge against absolute want. And, indeed, his soul loathed it; he had only contemplated it at first, not for himself, but for his kin, from a stern sense of duty.
Gillespie saw Maud off at the station next morning with Dick. He was carefully dressed, and wore, what was unusual with him, a flower in his button-hole. Maud’s last words to him were: ‘Now, Mr. Gillespie, remember: I rely upon you to keep Dick from backsliding.’
And Gillespie answered, with a courteous bow to the slim pale little creature who sat in deep mourning on the bare wooden seat of the third-class carriage (South-Eastern pattern): ‘You may count upon me, Miss Plantagenet, to carry out your programme.’
As they walked back together silently up the High towards Durham, Gillespie turned with a sudden dart to his friend and broke their joint reverie.
‘Is your sister engaged, Dick?’ he asked with a somewhat nervous jerk.
‘Why, no,’ Dick-answered, taken aback – ‘at least, not that I ever heard of.’
‘I should think she would be soon,’ Gillespie retorted meaningly.
‘Why so?’ Dick inquired in an unsuspecting voice.
‘Well, she’s very pretty,’ Gillespie answered; ‘and very clever; and very distinguished-looking.
‘She is pretty,’ Dick admitted, unsuspecting as before. No man ever really remembers his own sisters are women. ‘But, you see, she never meets any young men at Chiddingwick. There’s nobody to make love to her.’
‘So much the better!’ Gillespie replied, and then relapsed into silence.
CHAPTER XVI. LOOKING ABOUT HIM
During the rest of that broken term Dick did little work at history: he had lost heart for Oxford, and was occupied mainly in looking out for employment, scholastic or otherwise. Employment, however, wasn’t so easy to get. It never is nowadays. And Dick’s case was peculiar. A certain vague suspicion always attaches to a man who has left the University, or proposes to leave it, without taking his degree. Dick found this disqualification told heavily against him. Everybody at Durham, to be sure, quite understood that Plantagenet was only going down from stress of private circumstances, the father having left his family wholly unprovided for; but elsewhere people looked askance at an applicant for work who could but give his possession of a college Scholarship as his sole credential. The Dons, of course, were more anxious that Plantagenet should stop up, to do credit to the college – he was a safe First in History, and hot favourite for the Lothian – than that he should go away and get paying work elsewhere; and in the end poor Dick began almost to despair of finding any other employment to bring in prompt cash than the hateful one at Chidding-wick, which Maud had so determinedly set her face against.
Nor was it Maud only with whom he had now to contend in that matter of the Assembly Rooms. Mary, too, was against him. As soon as Maud returned to Chiddingwick, she had made it a duty to go straight to Mary and tell her how she felt about Dick’s horrid proposal. Now, Mary, at the first blush of it, had been so full of admiration for Dick’s heroic resolve – ‘for it was heroic, you know, Maud,’ she said simply, calling her future sister-in-law for the first time by her Christian name – that she forgot at the moment the bare possibility of trying to advise Dick otherwise. But now that Maud suggested the opposite point of view to her, she saw quite clearly that Maud was right; while she herself, less accustomed to facing the facts of life, had been carried away at first sight by a specious piece of unnecessary self-sacrifice. She admired Dick all the same for it, but she recognised none the less that the heroic course was not necessarily the wisest one.
So she wrote to Dick, urging him strongly – not only for his own sake, but for hers and his family’s – to keep away from Chiddingwick, save in the last extremity. She was quite ready, she declared, if he did come, to stand by every word she had said on the point when he first came to see her; but, still, Maud had convinced her that it was neither to his own interest nor his mother’s and sisters’ that he should turn back again now upon the upward step he had taken in going up to Oxford. She showed the letter to Maud before sending it off; and as soon as Maud had read it, the two girls, united in their love and devotion for Dick, fell on one another’s necks, and kissed and cried and sobbed with all their hearts till they were perfectly happy.
All this, however, though very wise in its way, didn’t make poor Dick’s path any the smoother to travel. He was at his wits’ end what to do. No door seemed to open for him. But fortunately Maud had commended her cause to Archie Gillespie at parting. Now, Gillespie was a practical man, with more knowledge of the world than Dick or his sweetheart, being, indeed, the son of a well-to-do Glasgow lawyer, whose business he was to join on leaving Oxford. He had discovered, therefore, the importance in this world of the eternal backstairs, as contrasted with the difficulty of effecting an entrance anywhere by the big front door or other recognised channels. So, when Sir Bernard Gillingham, that mighty man at the Foreign Office, came up on his promised visit to his son at Durham, Gillespie took good care to make the best of the occasion by getting an introduction to him from the Born Poet; and being a person of pleasant manners and graceful address, he soon succeeded in producing a most favourable impression on the mind of the diplomatist. Diplomatists are always immensely struck by a man who can speak the truth and yet be courteous. The last they exact as a sine qua non in life, but the first is a novelty to them. After awhile Gillespie mentioned to his new friend the painful case of an undergraduate of his college, Plan-tagenet by name, whose father had lately died under peculiar circumstances, leaving a large family totally unprovided for, and who was consequently obliged to go down without a degree and take what paying work he could find elsewhere immediately.
‘Plantagenet! Let me see – that’s the fellow that beat Trev for the History Scholarship, isn’t it?’ Sir Bernard said, musing. ‘Can’t be one of the Sheffield Plantagenets? No – no; for they left a round sum of money, which has never been claimed, and is still in Chancery. Extinct, I believe – extinct. Yet the name’s uncommon.’
‘This Plantagenet of ours claims to be something much more exalted than that,’ the Born Poet answered, trying to seem unconcerned: for ever since that little affair of the recitation from Barry Neville’s Collected Works, his conscience or its substitute had sorely smitten him. ‘I believe he wouldn’t take the other Plantagenets’ money if it came to him by right: he’s so firmly convinced he’s a son and heir of the genuine blood royal. He never says so, of course; he’s much too cute for such folly. But he lets it be seen through a veil of profound reserve he’s the real Simon Pure of Plantagenets, for all that; and I fancy he considers the Queen herself a mere new-fangled Stuart, whom he probably regards as Queen of Scots only.’
‘Plantagenet!’ Sir Bernard went on, still in the same musing voice, hardly heeding his son. ‘And a specialist in history! One would say the man was cut out for the Pipe-roll or the Record Office.’
‘He knows more about the history of the Plantagenet period than any man I ever met,’ Gillespie put in, striking while the iron was hot. ‘If you should happen to hear of any chance at the Record Office, now, or any department like that, a recommendation from you – ’
Sir Bernard snapped his fingers. ‘Too late by fifty years!’ he cried, with a pout of discontent – ‘too late by fifty years, at the very least, Mr. Gillespie! The competitive examination system has been the ruin of the country! Why, look at the sort of young men that scrape in somehow nowadays, even into the diplomatic service-some of them, I assure you, with acquired h’s, which to my mind are almost worse than no Ws at all, they’re so painfully obtrusive. I mean Trev for the diplomatic service; and in the good old days, before this nonsense cropped up, I should have said to the fellow at the head of the F. O. for the time being: “Look here, I say, Smith or Jones, can’t you find my eldest boy a good thing off the reel in our line somewhere?” And, by Jove! sir, before the week was out, as safe as houses, I’d have seen that boy gazetted outright to a paid attachéship at Rio or Copenhagen. But what’s the case nowadays? Why, ever since this wretched examination fad has come up to spoil all, my boy’ll have to go in and try his luck, helter-skelter, against all the tinkers and tailors, and soldiers and sailors, and butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers in the United Kingdom. That’s what examinations have done for us. It’s simply atrocious!’
