Читать книгу Blood Royal: A Novel - Allen Grant, Griffiths Arthur - Страница 2

Mr. Edmund Plantagenet residence in Chiddingwick High Street was less amply commodious, he often complained in the bosom of the family, than his ancestoral home at Windsor Castle, erected by his august and famous predecessor, King Edward III. of illustrious memory. Windsor Castle is a house fit for a gentleman to live in. But as Mr. Plantagenet himself had never inhabited the home of his forefathers – owing to family differences which left it for the time being in the occupation of a Lady ‘belonging to the younger branch of the house’ – he felt the loss of his hereditary domains less keenly than might perhaps have been expected from so sensitive a person. Still, the cottage at Chiddingwick, judged even by the less exalted standard of Mr. Planta-genet’s own early recollections, was by no means unduly luxuriant. For Edmund Plantagenet had been well brought up, and received in his day the education of a gentleman. Even now, in his dishonoured and neglected old age, abundant traces of the Charterhouse still remained to the bitter end in his voice and manner. But little else was left. The White Horse had stolen away whatever other relics of gentility Mr. Plantagenet possessed, and had reduced him in his latter days to the miserable ruin of what was once a man, and even a man of letters.

It was a sad history, and, alas! a very common one. Thirty years before, when Edmund Plan tagenet, not yet a believer in his own real or pretended royal descent, went up to London from Yorkshire to seek his fortune in literature, he was one of the handsomest and most popular young men in his own society. His name alone succeeded in attracting attention; we are not all of us Plantagenets. The admirable Lady Postlethwaite, arbiter in her day of literary reputation, gave the man with the royal surname the run of her well-known salon; editors accepted readily enough his inflated prose and his affected poetry; and all the world went well with him for a time – while he remained a bachelor. But one fine day Edmund Plantagenet took it into his head, like many better men, to fall in love – we have done it ourselves, and we know how catching it is – and not only to fall in love, but also, which is worse, to give effect to his feelings by actually getting married. In after-life Mr. Plantagenet regarded that unfortunate step as the one fatal error in an otherwise blameless career. He felt that with a name and prospects like his he ought at least to have married rank, title, or money. Instead of which he just threw himself away: he married only beauty, common-sense, and goodness. The first of these fades, the second palls, and the third Mr. Plantagenet was never constructed to appreciate. But rank and money appeal to all, and persist unchanged after such skin-deep attractions as intellect or good looks have ceased to interest.

From the day of his marriage, then, Edmund Plantagenet’s downward career began. As a married man, he became at once of less importance in Lady Postlethwaite’s society – he was so useful for dances. Editors found out by degrees that he had only affectation and audacity in place of genius; work fell short as children increased; and evil days began to close in upon the growing family. But what was worst of all, as money grew scarcer, a larger and larger proportion of it went each day to swell the receipts, at first of his club, and afterwards, when clubs became things of the past, of the nearest public-house. To make a long story short, before many years were over, Edmund Plantagenet, the young, the handsome, the promising, had degenerated from a dashing and well-bred fellow into a miserable sot of the sorriest description.

But just in proportion as his real position grew worse and worse did Mr. Plantagenet buoy himself up in secret with magnificent ideas about his origin and ancestry. Even in his best days, indeed, he would never consent to write under his own real name; he wouldn’t draggle the honour of the Plantagenets in the dirt of the street, he said with fine contempt; so he adopted for literary purposes the high-sounding pseudonym of Barry Neville. But after he began to decline, and to give way to drink, his pretensions to royal blood became well-nigh ridiculous. Not, indeed, that anyone ever heard him boast noisily of his origin; Edmund Plantagenet was too clever a man of the world to adopt such futile and obvious tactics; he knew a plan worth two of that; he posed as a genuine descendant of the old Kings of England, more by tacit assumption than by open assertion. Silence played his game far better than speech. When people tried to question him on the delicate point of his pedigree, he evaded them neatly, but with a mysterious air which seemed to say every bit as plain as words could say it: ‘I choose to waive my legitimate claim, and I won’t allow any man to bully me into asserting it.’ As he often implied to his familiar friends, he was too much a gentleman to dispute the possession of the throne with a lady.

But Mr. Plantagenet’s present ostensible means of gaining an honest livelihood was by no means a regal one. He kept, as he was wont to phrase it gently himself, a temple of Terpsichore. In other words, he taught the local dancing-class. In his best days in London, when fortune still smiled upon him, he had been famed as the most graceful waltzer in Lady Postlethwaite’s set; and now that the jade had deserted him, at his lowest depth, he had finally settled down as the Chiddingwick dancing-master. Sot as he was, all Chiddingwick supported him loyally, for his name’s sake; even Lady Agatha’s children attended his lessons. It was a poor sort of trade, indeed, for the last of the Plantagenets; but he consoled himself under the disgrace with the cheerful reflection that he served, after all, as it were, as his own Lord Chamberlain.

On this particular night, however, of all the year, Mr. Plantagenet felt more profoundly out of humour with the world in general and his own ancestral realm of England in particular, than was at all usual with him. The fact was, his potential subjects had been treating him with marked want of consideration for his real position. Kings in exile are exposed to intolerable affronts. The landlord of the White Horse had hinted at the desirability of arrears of pay on the score of past brandies and sodas innumerable. The landlord was friendly, and proud of his guest, who ‘kept the house together’; but at times he broke out in little fits of petulance. Now, Mr. Planta-genet, as it happened, had not the wherewithal to settle this little account off-hand, and he took it ill of Barnes, who, as he justly remarked, ‘had had so much out of him,’ that he should endeavour to hurry a gentleman of birth in the matter of payment. He sat by his own fireside, therefore, in no very amiable humour, and watched the mother bustling about the room with her domestic preparations for the family supper.

‘Clarence,’ Mr. Plantagenet said, after a moment of silence, to one of the younger boys, ‘have you prepared your Thucydides? It’s getting very late. You seem to me to be loafing about doing nothing.’

‘Oh, I know it pretty well,’ Clarence answered with a nonchalant air, still whittling at a bit of stick he was engaged in transforming into a homemade whistle. ‘I looked it over in class. It’s not very hard. Thucydides is rot – most awful rot! It won’t take five minutes.’

Mr. Plantagenet, with plump fingers, rolled himself another cigarette. He had come down in the world, and left cigars far behind, a fragrant memory of the distant past; but as a gentleman he could never descend to the level of a common clay pipe.

‘Very well,’ he said blandly, leaning back in his chair and beaming upon Clarence: a peculiar blandness of tone and manner formed Mr. Plan-tagenet’s keynote. ‘That may do for me, perhaps; but it won’t do for Richard.’

After which frank admission of his own utter abdication of parental prerogatives in favour of his own son, he proceeded very deliberately to light his cigarette and stare with placid eyes at the dilatory Clarence.

There was a minute’s pause; then Mr. Plantagenet began again.

‘Eleanor,’ he remarked, in the same soft, self-indulgent voice, to his youngest daughter, ‘you don’t seem to be doing anything. I’m sure you’ve got some lessons to prepare for to-morrow.’

Not that Mr. Plantagenet was in the least concerned for the progress of his children’s education; but the deeper they were engaged with their books, the less noise did they make with their ceaseless chatter in the one family sitting-room, and the more did they leave their fond father in peace to his own reflections.

‘Oh, there’s plenty of time,’ Eleanor answered, with a little toss of her pretty head. ‘I can do ‘em by-and-by – after Dick comes in. He’ll soon be coming.’

‘I wish to goodness he’d come, then!’ the head of the house ejaculated fervently; ‘for the noise you all make when he isn’t here to look after you is enough to distract a saint. All day long I have to scrape at my fiddle; and when I come back home at night I have to sit, as best I can, in a perfect bedlam. It’s too much for my poor nerves. They never were vigorous. – Henry, my boy, will you stop that intolerable noise? – A Jew’s harp, too! Goodness gracious! what a vulgar instrument! – Dick’s late to-night. I wonder what keeps him.’

It was part and parcel of Mr. Plantagenet’s silent method of claiming royal descent that he called all his children with studious care after the earlier Plantagenets, his real or supposed ancestors, who were Kings of England. Thus his firstborn was Richard, in memory of their distinguished predecessor, the mighty Cour-de-Lion; his next was Lionel Clarence, after the second son of Edward IV., the particular prince upon whom Mr. Plantagenet chose to affiliate his family pedigree; and his third was Henry, that being the Plantagenet name which sat first and oftenest upon the throne of England. His eldest girl, in like manner, was christened Maud, after the foundress of his house, who married Geoffrey Plantagenet, and so introduced the blood of the Conqueror into the Angevin race; his youngest was Eleanor, after the wife of Henry II., ‘who brought us Poitou and Aquitaine as heirlooms.’

Mr. Plantagenet, indeed, never overtly mentioned these interesting little points in public himself; but they oozed out, for all that, by lateral leakage, and redounded thereby much the more to their contriver’s credit. His very reticence told not a little in his favour. For a dancing-master to claim by word or deed that he is de jure King of England would be to lay himself open to unsparing ridicule; but to let it be felt or inferred that he is so, without ever for one moment arrogating to himself the faintest claim to the dignity, is to pose in silence as an injured innocent – a person of most distinguished and exalted origin, with just that little suspicion of pathos and mystery about his unspoken right which makes the thing really dignified and interesting. So people at the White Horse were wont to whisper to one another in an awe-struck undertone that ‘if every man had his rights, there’s some as says our Mr. Plantagenet had ought to be sot pretty high well up where the Queen’s a-sitting.’ And though Mr. Plantagenet himself used gently to brush aside the flattering impeachment with one wave of his pompous hand – ‘All that’s been altered long ago, my dear sir, by the Act of Settlement’ – yet he came in for a good many stray glasses of sherry at other people’s expense, on the strength of the popular belief that he might, under happier auspices, have filled a throne, instead of occupying the chair of honour by the old oak chimney-piece in a public-house parlour.

Hardly, however, had Mr. Plantagenet uttered those memorable words, ‘Dick’s late to-night; I wonder what keeps him,’ when the front door opened, and the Heir Apparent entered.

Immediately some strange change seemed to pass by magic over the assembled household. Everybody looked up, as though an event had occurred. Mrs. Plantagenet herself, a weary-looking woman with gentle goodness beaming out of every line in her worn face, gave a sigh of relief.

‘Oh, Dick,’ she cried, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come! We’ve all been waiting for you.’

Richard glanced round the room with a slight air of satisfaction. It was always a pleasure to him to find his father at home, and not, as was his wont, in the White Horse parlour; though, to say the truth, the only reason for Mr. Planta-genet’s absence that night from his accustomed haunt was this little tiff with the landlord over his vulgar hints of payment. Then he stooped down and kissed his mother tenderly on the forehead, patted Eleanor’s curly head with a brotherly caress, gave a kindly glance at Prince Hal, as he loved to call him mentally, and sat down in the easy-chair his mother pushed towards him.

For a moment there was silence; then Dick began in an explanatory voice:

‘I’m sorry I’m late; but I had a piece of work to finish to-night, mother – rather particular work, too: a little bit of bookbinding.’

‘You get paid extra for that, Richard, don’t you?’ his father asked, growing interested.

‘Well, yes,’ Dick answered, rather grudgingly;

‘I get paid extra for that; I do it in overtime.

But that wasn’t all,’ he went on hurriedly, well aware that his father was debating in his own mind whether he couldn’t on the strength of it borrow a shilling. ‘It was a special piece of work for the new governess at the Rectory. And, mother, isn’t it odd? her name’s Mary Tudor!’

‘There isn’t much in that,’ his father answered, balancing his cigarette daintily between his first and second finger. ‘“A’ Stuarts are na sib to the King,” you know, Richard. The Plantagenets who left the money had nothing to do with the Royal Family – that is to say, with us,’ Mr. Plantagenet went on, catching himself up by an after-thought.

‘They were mere Sheffield cutlers, people of no antecedents, who happened to take our name upon themselves by a pure flight of fancy, because they thought it high-sounding. Which it is, undoubtedly. And as for Tudors, bless your heart, they’re common enough in Wales. In point of fact – though I’m proud of Elizabeth, as a by-blow of the family – we must always bear in mind that for us, my dear boy, the Tudors were never anything but a distinct mesalliance.’

‘Of course,’ Richard answered with profound conviction.

His father glanced at him sharply. To Mr. Plantagenet himself this shadowy claim to royal descent was a pretty toy to be employed for the mystification of strangers and the aggrandisement of the family – a lever to work on Lady Agatha’s feelings; but to his eldest son it was an article of faith, a matter of the most cherished and the profoundest belief, a reason for behaving one’s self in every position in life so as not to bring disgrace on so distinguished an ancestry.

A moment’s silence intervened; then Dick turned round with his grave smile to Clarence:

‘And how does Thucydides get on?’ he asked with brotherly solicitude.

Clarence wriggled a little uneasily on his wooden chair.

‘Well, it’s not a hard bit,’ he answered, with a shamefaced air. ‘I thought I could do it in a jiffy after you came home, Dick. It won’t take two minutes. It’s just that piece, don’t you know, about the revolt in Corcyra.’

Dick looked down at him reproachfully..

‘Oh, Clarry,’ he cried with a pained face, ‘you know you can’t have looked at it. Not a hard bit, indeed! why, it’s one of the obscurest and most debated passages in all Thucydides! Now, what’s the use of my getting you a nomination, old man, and coaching you so hard, and helping to pay your way at the grammar school, in hopes of your getting an Exhibition in time, if you won’t work for yourself, and lift yourself on to a better position?’ And he glanced at the wooden mantelpiece, on whose vacant scroll he had carved deep with his penknife his own motto in life, ‘Noblesse oblige,’ in Lombardic letters, for his brother’s benefit.

Clarence dropped his eyes and looked really penitent.

‘Well, but I say, Dick,’ he answered quickly, ‘if it’s so awfully difficult, don’t you think it ‘ud be better for me to go over it with you first – just a running construe – and then I’d get a clearer idea of what the chap was driving at from the very beginning?’

‘Certainly not,’ Dick answered gravely, with a little concern in his voice, for he saw in this clever plea somewhat too strong an echo of Mr. Plan-tagenet’s own fatal plausibility. ‘You should spell it out first as well as you can by yourself; and then, when you’ve made out all you’re able to with grammar and dictionary, you should come to me in the last resort to help you. Now sit down to it, there’s a good boy. I shan’t be able in future to help you quite as much in your work as I’ve been used to do.’

He spoke with a seriousness that was above his years. To say the truth, Mr. Plantagenet’s habits had almost reversed their relative places in the family. Dick was naturally conscientious, having fortunately inherited his moral characteristics rather from his mother’s side than from his father’s; and being thrown early into the position of assistant bread-winner and chief adviser to the family, he had grown grave before his time, and felt the weight of domestic cares already heavy upon his shoulders. As for Clarence, who had answered his father with scant respect, he never thought for a moment of disobeying the wishes of his elder brother. He took up the dog-eared Thucydides that had served them both in turn, and the old Liddell and Scott that was still common property, and began conning over the chapter set before him with conspicuous diligence. Dick looked on meanwhile with no little satisfaction, while Eleanor went on with her work, in her chair in the corner, vaguely conscious all the time of meriting his approbation.

At last, just as they sat down to their frugal supper of bread and cheese and water – for by Dick’s desire they were all, save one, teetotalers – Dick sprang a mine upon the assembled company by saying out all at once in a most matter-of-fact voice to his neighbour Clarry:

‘No, I shan’t be able to help you very much in future, I’m afraid – because, next week, I’m going up to Oxford – to try for a scholarship.’

A profound spell of awed silence followed this abrupt disclosure of a long-formed plan. Mr. Plantagenet himself was the first to break it. He rose to the occasion.

‘Well, I’m glad at least, my son,’ he said, in his most grandiose manner, ‘you propose to give yourself the education of a gentleman.’

‘And therefore,’ Dick continued, with a side-glance at Clarence, ‘I shall need all my spare time for my own preparation.’