|Next morning, when Richard went down to his work in town, Mr. Wells,
his employer, accosted him at once with the unwelcome greeting:
'Hullo, Plantagenet, so I hear you're going up to college at Oxford!'
Nothing on earth could well have been more unpleasant for poor Dick. He
saw at once from Mr. Wells's tone that his father must have bragged: he
must have spoken of the projected trip at the White Horse last night,
not as a mere speculative journey in search of a problematical and
uncertain Scholarship, but as a _fait accompli_--a domestic arrangement
dependent on the mere will of the house of Plantagenet. He must have
treated his decision as when a Duke decides that he shall send his son
and heir to Christ Church or Trinity.
This mode of envisaging the subject was doubly annoying to Dick, for not
only would he feel most keenly the disgrace of returning empty-handed
if he failed in the examination, but relations might perhaps become
strained meanwhile between himself and Mr. Wells, if the employer
thought he might at any moment be deprived of the assistant's services.
However, we must all answer for the sins of our fathers: there was
nothing for it now but to brazen it out as best he might; so Dick at
once confided to his master the true state of the case, explaining
that he would only want a few days' holiday, during which he engaged
to supply an efficient substitute; that his going to Oxford permanently
must depend on his success in the Scholarship examination; and that even
if he succeeded--which he modestly judged unlikely--he wouldn't need to
give up his present engagement and go into residence at the University
till October.
These explanations, frankly given with manly candour, had the good
effect of visibly mollifying Mr. Wells's nascent and half-unspoken
resentment. Richard had noticed just at first that he assumed a
sarcastic and somewhat aggrieved tone, as one who might have expected to
be the first person informed of this intended new departure. But as soon
as all was satisfactorily cleared up, the bookseller's manner changed
immediately, and he displayed instead a genuine interest in the success
of the great undertaking. To say the truth, Mr. Wells was not a little
proud of his unique assistant. He regarded him with respect, not unmixed
with pity.
All Chiddingwick, indeed, took a certain compassionate interest in the
Plantagenet family. They were, so to speak, public property and local
celebrities. Lady Agatha Moore herself, the wife of the Squire, and an
Earl's daughter, always asked Mrs. Plantagenet to her annual
garden-party. Chiddingwickians pointed out the head of the house to
strangers, and observed with pardonable possessive pride: 'That's our
poor old dancing-master; he's a Plantagenet born, and some people say if
it hadn't been for those unfortunate Wars of the Roses he'd have been
King of England. But now he holds classes at the White Horse Assembly
Rooms.'
Much more then had Mr. Wells special reason to be proud of his own
personal relations with the heir of the house, the final inheritor of so
much shadowy and hypothetical splendour. The moment he learned the
real nature of Dick Plantagenet's errand, he was kindness itself to his
clever assistant. He desired to give Dick every indulgence in his power.
Mind the shop? No, certainly not! Richard would want all his time now
to cram for the examination. He must cram, cram, cram; there was nothing
like cramming!
Mr. Wells, laudably desirous of keeping well abreast with the
educational movement of the present day, laid immense stress upon this
absolute necessity for cram in the modern world. He even advised Richard
to learn by heart the names and dates of all the English monarchs Dick
could hardly forbear a smile at this naïve but well-meant proposal. He
had worked hard at Modern History, both British and continental, in all
his spare time, ever since he left the grammar school, and few men at
the University knew as much as he did of our mediaeval annals. We are
all for 'epochs' nowadays; and Dick's epoch was the earlier middle age
of feudalism. But the notion that anything so childish as the names and
dates of kings could serve his purpose tickled his gravity not a little.
Still, the advice was kindly meant, up to Mr. Wells's lights, and Dick
received it with grave courtesy, making answer politely that all these
details were already familiar to him.
During the four days that remained before the trip to Oxford, Mr. Wells
wouldn't hear of Richard's doing any more work in the shop than was
absolutely necessary. He must spend all his time, the good man said, in
reading Hume and Smollett--the latest historical authorities of whom the
Chiddingwick bookseller had any personal knowledge. Dick availed himself
for the most part of his employer's kindness; but there was one piece
of work, he said, which he couldn't neglect, no matter what happened. It
was a certain bookbinding job of no very great import--just a couple of
volumes to cover in half-calf for the governess at the Rectory. Yet he
insisted upon doing it.
Somehow, though he had only seen Mary Tudor once, for those few minutes
in the shop, he attached a very singular and sentimental importance
to binding that book for her. She was a pretty girl, for one thing--an
extremely pretty girl--and he admired her intensely. But that wasn't
all; she was a Tudor, as well, and he was a Plan-tagenet. In some vague,
half-conscious way he reflected more than once that 'it had gone with a
Tudor, and with a Tudor it might come back again.' What he meant by
that _it_ he hardly knew himself. Certainly not the crown of this United
Kingdom; for Dick was far too good a student of constitutional history
not to be thoroughly aware that the crown of England itself was
elective, not hereditary; and he had far too much common-sense to
suppose for one moment that the people of these three realms would
desire to disturb the Act of Settlement and repeal the Union in order to
place a local dancing-master or a bookseller's assistant on the throne
of England--for to Scotland he hadn't even the shadowy claim of an
outside pretender. As he put it himself, 'We were fairly beaten out of
there once for all by the Bruce, and had never at the best of times any
claim to speak of.' No; what he meant by _It_ was rather some dim past
greatness of the Plantagenet family, which the bookseller's lad hoped
to win back to some small extent in the noblest and best of all ways--by
deserving it.
The days wore away; Stubbs and Freeman were well thumbed; the two
books for Mary Tudor were bound in the daintiest fashion known to
Chiddingwickian art, and on the morning of the eventful Wednesday
itself, when he was first to try his fate at Oxford, Dick took them
up in person, neatly wrapped in white tissue-paper, to the door of the
Rectory.
Half-way up the garden-path Mary met him by accident. She was walking
in the grounds with one of the younger children; and Dick, whose quick
imagination had built up already a curious castle in the air, felt half
shocked to find that a future Queen of England, Wales, and Ireland (_de
jure_) should be set to take care of the Rector's babies. However,
he forgot his indignation when Mary, recognising him, advanced with
a pleasant smile--her smile was always considered the prettiest thing
about her--and said in a tone as if addressed to an equal:
'Oh, you've brought back my books, have you? That's punctuality itself.
Don't mind taking them to the door. How much are they, please? I'll pay
at once for them.'
Now, this was a trifle disconcerting to Dick, who had reasons of his own
for not wishing her to open the parcel before him. Still, as there was
no way out of it, he answered in a somewhat shamefaced and embarrassed
voice: 'It comes to three-and-sixpence.'
Mary had opened the packet meanwhile, and glanced hastily at the
covers. She saw in a second that the bookseller's lad had exceeded her
instructions. For the books were bound in full calf, very dainty and
delicate, and on the front cover of each was stamped in excellent
workmanship a Tudor rose, with the initials M. T. intertwined in a neat
little monogram beneath it. She looked at them for a moment with blank
dismay in her eye, thinking just at first what a lot he must be going to
charge her for it; then, as he named the price, a flush of shame rose of
a sudden to her soft round cheek.
'Oh no,' she said hurriedly. 'It must be more than that. You couldn't
possibly bind them so for only three-and-sixpence!'
'Yes, I did,' Dick answered, now as crimson as herself. 'You'll find the
bill inside. Mr. Wells wrote it out. There's no error at all. You'll see
it's what I tell you.'
Mary fingered her well-worn purse with uncertain fingers.
'Surely,' she said again, 'you've done it all in calf. Mr. Wells can't
have known exactly how you were doing it.'
This put a Plantagenet at once upon his mettle.
'Certainly he did,' Dick answered, almost haughtily. 'It was a remnant
of calf, no use for anything else, that I just made fit by designing
those corners. He said I could use it up if I cared to take the trouble.
And I _did_ care to take the trouble, and to cut a block for the rose,
and to put on the monogram, which was all my own business, in my own
overtime. Three-and-sixpence is the amount it's entered in the books
for.'
Mary gazed hard at him in doubt. She scarcely knew what to do. She
felt by pure instinct he was too much of a gentleman to insult him by
offering him money for what had obviously been a labour of love to him;
and yet, for her own part, she didn't like to receive those handsome
covers to some extent as a present from a perfect stranger, and
especially from a man in his peculiar position. Still, what else could
she do? The books were her own; she couldn't refuse them now, merely
because he chose to put a Tudor rose upon them--all the more as they
contained those little marginal notes of 'localities' and 'finds' which
even the amateur botanist prizes in his heart above all printed records;
and she couldn't bear to ask this grave and dignified young man to take
the volumes back, remove the covers on which he had evidently spent so
much pains and thought, and replace them by three-and-sixpence worth of
plain cloth, unlettered. In the end she was constrained to say frigidly,
in a lowered voice:
'They're extremely pretty. It was good of you to take so much trouble
about an old book like this.
There's the money; thank you--and--I'm greatly obliged to you.'
The words stuck in her throat. She said them almost necessarily with
some little stiffness. And as she spoke she looked down, and dug
her parasol into the gravel of the path for nervousness. But Richard
Plantagenet's pride was far deeper than her own. He took the money
frankly; that was Mr. Wells's; then he answered in that lordly voice he
had inherited from his father:
'I'm glad you like the design. It's not quite original; I copied it
myself with a few variations from the cover of a book that once belonged
to Margaret Tudor. Her initials and yours are the same. But I see you
think I oughtn't to have done it. I'm sorry for that; yet I had some
excuse. I thought a Plantagenet might venture to take a little more
pains than usual over a book for a Tudor. _Noblesse oblige_.'
And as he spoke, standing a yard or two off her, with an air of stately
dignity, he lifted his hat, and then moved slowly off down the path to
the gate again.
Mary didn't know why, but with one of those impulsive fits which often
come over sympathetic women, she ran hastily after him.
'I beg your pardon,' she said, catching him up, and looking into his
face with her own as flushed as his. 'I'm afraid I've hurt you. I'm sure
I didn't mean to. It was very, very kind of you to design and print
that monogram so nicely. I understand your reasons, and I'm immensely
obliged. It's a beautiful design. I shall be proud to possess it.'
As for Richard, he dared hardly raise his eyes to meet hers, they were
so full of tears. This rebuff was very hard on him. But the tell-tale
moisture didn't quite escape Mary.
'Thank you,' he said simply. I meant no rudeness; very much the
contrary. The coincidence interested me; it made me wish to do the
thing for you as well as I could. I'm sorry if I was obtrusive. But--one
sometimes forgets--or perhaps remembers. It's good of you to speak so
kindly.'
And he raised his hat once more, and, walking rapidly off without
another word, disappeared down the road in the direction of the High
Street.
As soon as he was gone Mary went back into the Rectory. Mrs. Tradescant,
the Rector's wife, was standing in the hall. Mary reflected at once that
the little girl had listened open-eared to all this queer colloquy, and
that, to prevent misapprehension, the best thing she could do would be
to report it all herself before the child could speak of it. So she told
the whole story of the strange young man who had insisted on binding her
poor dog-eared old botany-book in such regal fashion. Mrs. Tradescant
glanced at it, and only smiled.
'Oh, my dear, you mustn't mind him,' she said. 'He's one of those crazy
Plantagenets. They're a very queer lot--as mad as hatters. The poor
old father's a drunken old wretch; come down in the world, they say. He
teaches dancing; but his mania is that he ought by rights to be King of
England. He never says so openly, you know; he's too cunning for that;
but in a covert sort of way he lays tacit claim to it. The son's a very
well-con-ducted young man in his own rank, I believe, but as cracked as
the father; and as for the daughter, oh, my dear--such a stuck-up sort
of a girl, with a feather in her hat and a bee in her bonnet, who goes
out and gives music-lessons! It's dreadful, really! She plays the violin
rather nicely, I hear; but she's an odious creature. The books? Oh yes,
that's just the sort of thing Dick Plantagenet would love. He's mad on
antiquity. If he saw on the title-page your name was Mary Tudor, he'd
accept you at once as a remote cousin, and he'd claim acquaintance
off-hand by a royal monogram. The rose is not bad. But the best thing
you can do is to take no further notice of him.'
A little later that very same morning, however, Richard Plantagenet,
mad or sane, was speeding away across country, in a parliamentary
train, towards Reading and Oxford, decided in his own mind now about two
separate plans he had deeply at heart. The first one was that, for the
honour of the Plantagenets, he mustn't fail to get that Scholarship
at Durham College; the second was that, when he came back with it to
Chiddingwick, he must make Mary Tudor understand he was at least a
gentleman. He was rather less in love with her, to be sure, after this
second meeting, than he had been after the first; but, still, he liked
her immensely, and in spite of her coldness was somehow attracted
towards her; and he couldn't bear to think a mere Welsh Tudor, not even
really royal, should feel herself degraded by receiving a gift of a
daintily-bound book from the hands of the Heir Apparent of the true and
only Plantagenets.