Grant Allen - Blood Royal - A Novel

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.’