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!'