world about that. It’s a duty you owe to yourself, and to us – and to England. Only, of course, we shall all feel your absence a very great deal. Dick, Dick, you’re so much to us! And I don’t know,’ she went on, as she glanced at the little ones with an uncertain air – ‘I don’t know that I’d have mentioned it before babes and sucklings – well, till I was sure I’d got it.’
She said it with an awkward flush; for Dick caught her eye as she spoke, and read her inner meaning. She wondered he had blurted it out prematurely before her father. And Dick, too, saw his mistake. Mr. Plantagenet, big with such important news, would spread it abroad among his cronies in the White Horse parlour before tomorrow was over!
Richard turned to the children.
‘Now, look here, boys,’ he said gravely: ‘this is a private affair, and we’ve talked it over here without reserve in the bosom of the family. But we’ve talked it over in confidence. It mustn’t be repeated. If I were to go up and try for this Scholarship, and then not get it, all Chiddingwick would laugh at me for a fellow that didn’t know his proper place, and had to be taught to know it.
For the honour of the family, boys – and you too, Nellie – I hope you won’t whisper a word of all this to anybody in town. Consider what a disgrace it would be if I came back unsuccessful, and everybody in the parish came up and commiserated me: “We’re so sorry, Mr. Dick, you failed at Oxford. But there, you see, you had such great disadvantages!”’
His handsome face burned bright red at the bare thought of such a disgrace; and the little ones, who, after all, were Plantagenets at heart as much as himself, every one of them made answer with one accord:
‘We won’t say a word about it.’
They promised it so earnestly, and with such perfect assurance, that Dick felt he could trust them. His eye caught Maud’s. The same thought passed instinctively through both their minds. What a painful idea that the one person they couldn’t beg for very shame to hold his tongue was the member of the family most likely to blab it out to the first chance comer!
Maud sat down and ate her supper. She was a pretty girl, very slender and delicate, with a fair pink-and-white skin, and curious flashing eyes, most unusual in a blonde, though she was perhaps just a shade less handsome and distinguished-looking than the Heir Apparent.
All through the meal little else was talked of than this projected revolution, Dick’s great undertaking. The boys were most full of it. ‘Our Dick at Oxford! It was ripping – simply ripping! A lark of the first dimensions!’ Clarence made up his mind at once to go up and see Dick his very first term, in oak-panelled rooms at Durham College. They must be oak-panelled. While Harry, who had feasted on ‘Verdant Green’ for weeks, was anxious to know what sort of gown he’d have to wear, and whether he thought he’d have ample opportunities for fighting the proctors.
‘Twas a foregone conclusion. So innocently did they all discount ‘Our Dick’s’ success, and so firmly did they believe that whatever he attempted he was certain to succeed in!
After supper Mr. Plantagenet rose with an important air, and unhooked his hat very deliberately from its peg. His wife and Dick and Maud all cried out with one voice:
‘Why, surely you’re not going out to-night, father!’
For to go out, they knew well, in Mr. Planta-genet’s dialect, meant to spend the evening in the White Horse parlour.
‘Yes, my dear,’ Mr. Plantagenet answered, in his blandest tone, turning round to his wife with apologetic suavity. ‘The fact is, I have a very particular engagement this evening. No, no, Dick, my boy; don’t try to detain me. Gentlemen are waiting for me. The claims of social life, my dear son – so much engaged – my sole time for the world – my one hour of recreation! Besides, strangers have been specially invited to meet me – people who have heard of my literary reputation! ‘Twould be churlish to disappoint them.’
And, brushing his son aside, Mr. Plantagenet stuck his hat on jauntily just a trifle askew, with ponderous airiness, and strolled down the steps as he adjusted his Inverness cape on his ample shoulders, with the air of a gentleman seeking his club, with his martial cloak around him.
For in point of fact it had occurred to Mr. Plantagenet as they sat at supper that, if he burst in upon the White Horse as the first bearer of such novel and important gossip – how his son Richard was shortly going to enter as an undergraduate at Durham College, Oxford – not only would he gain for himself great honour and glory, but also some sympathizing friend, proud to possess the privilege of acquaintance with so distinguished a family, would doubtless mark his sense of the dignity of the occasion by offering its head the trifling hospitality of a brandy-and-soda. And since brandy-and-soda formed the mainspring of Mr. Plantagenet’s scheme of being, so noble an opportunity for fulfilling the end and aim of his existence, he felt sure, was not to be lightly neglected.
He strolled out, all smiles, apologetic, but peremptory. As soon as he was gone, the three remaining elders glanced hard at one another with blank surmise in their eyes; but they said nothing openly. Only, in his heart, Richard blamed himself with bitter blame for his unwonted indiscretion in blurting out the whole truth. He knew that by ten to-morrow morning all the world of Chidding-wick would have heard of his projected little trip to Oxford.
When the younger ones were gone to bed, the three still held their peace and only looked at each other. Mutual shame prevented them from ever outwardly commenting on the father’s weaknesses. Maud was the first to break the long deep silence.
‘After this, Dick,’ she said decisively, ‘there’s no other way out of it. You’ve burnt your boats. If you kill yourself to do it, you must win that Scholarship!’
‘I must,’ Dick answered firmly. ‘And what’s more, I will. I’ll get it or die for it. I could never stand the disgrace, now, of coming back empty-handed to Chiddingwick without it.’
‘Perhaps,’ Mrs. Plantagenet suggested, speaking boldly out the thought that lurked in all their minds, ‘he won’t say a word of it.’
Maud and Dick looked up at her with incredulous amazement. ‘Oh, mother!’ was all they could say. They knew their father’s moods too well by far to buoy themselves up with such impossible expectations.
‘Well, it seals the business, anyhow,’ Dick went on, after a moment’s pause. ‘I must get it now, that’s simply certain. Though, to be sure, I don’t know that anything could make me try much harder than I’d have tried before, for your sake, mother, and for Maud’s, and the children’s, and the honour of the family.’
‘I wish I had your faith, Dick, in the honour of the family,’ Mrs. Plantagenet sighed wearily. ‘I can’t feel it myself. I never could feel it, somehow. Though, of course, it’s a good thing if it makes you work and hold your head up in life, and do the best you ever can for Maud and the children. Anything’s good that’s an incentive to exertion. Yet I often wish, when I see how hard you both have to toil and moil, with the music and all that, we didn’t belong to the royal stock at all, but to the other Plantagenets, who left the money.’
Both Richard and Maud exclaimed with one accord at these painful words: ‘Oh, don’t, dear mother!’ To them, her speech sounded like sheer desecration. Faith in their own unsullied Plan-tagenet blood was for both a religion. And, indeed, no wonder. It had spurred them on to all that was highest and best within them. To give up that magnificent heritage of princely descent for mere filthy lucre would have seemed to either an unspeakable degradation. They loved their mother dearly; yet they often reflected, in a vague, half-unconscious sort of undercurrent of thought, that after all she was not herself a born Plantagenet, as they were;
