It was quite a dignified speech for Mr. Plan-tagenet. Dick's, heart was touched by it.
'I beg your pardon, father,' he replied in a very low tone. 'I'm sorry if I've hurt you. But I meant no rudeness. I've engaged pleasant lodgings for you in a very nice street, and I'm sure I'll do everything in my power to make your visit a happy one.'
As he spoke he almost believed his father would rise for once to the height of the circumstances, and behave himself circumspectly with decorum and dignity during his few days at Oxford.
To do Mr. Plantagenet justice, indeed, he tried very hard to keep straight for once, and during all his stay he never even entered the doors of a hotel or public-house. Nay, more; in Dick's own rooms, as Dick noticed with pleasure, he was circumspect in his drinking. It flattered his vanity and his social pretensions to be introduced to his son's friends and to walk at his ease through the grounds of the college. Once more for a day or two Edmund Plantagenet felt himself a gentleman among gentlemen.
Dick kept as close to him as possible, except at lecture hours; and then, as far as he could, he handed him over to the friendly care of Gillespie, who mounted guard in turn, and seemed to enter silently into the spirit of the situation. As much as possible, on the other hand, Dick avoided for those days Gillingham and Faussett's set, whose only wish, he felt sure, would be to draw his father into wild talk about the Plantagenet pedigree--a subject which Dick himself, in spite of his profound faith, had the good sense to keep always most sedulously in the background.
For the first three days Dick was enabled to write nightly and report to Maud that so far all went well, and there were no signs of a catastrophe. But on the fourth day, as ill-luck would have it, Gillingham came round to Faussett's rooms full of a chance discovery he had that moment lighted upon.
'Why, who'd ever believe it?' he cried, all agog. 'This man Plantagenet, who's come up to see his son--the Prince of the Blood--is a decayed writer, a man of letters of the Alaric Watts and Leigh Hunt period, not unheard of in his day as an inflated essayist. I know a lot of his stuff by heart--Hazlitt-and-water sort of style; De Quincey gone mad, with a touch of Bulwer. Learnt it when I was a boy, and we lived at Constantinople. He's the man who used to gush under the name of Barry Neville!'