|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.