Dick\'s first year at the Pipe-roll was anything but a lazy one. Opulence in the shape of two hundred and fifty a year came to him with the encumbrance of plenty to do for it. He had the office routine to learn, and rolls and tallies to decipher, and endless household difficulties of his own to meet, and all the children\'s schooling and other arrangements to look after, It was still a struggle. But by dint of hard work and pinching, with Maud\'s able assistance, things came straight in the end somehow. Dick got a pupil or two in his spare time—happier men than himself, who were going up under luckier auspices to Oxford; for, though Dick put the best face upon it, still, it was a pull leaving that beloved University without a degree. However, the year wore on, as most years wear on, good, bad, or indifferent; and Mary Tudor, too, left her place at Chiddingwick Rectory, and got another one, better paid, with nice people in Westminster. She was a constant Sunday visitor at the Plantagenets\' rooms; and so, in vacation, was Archie Gillespie, whose unfailing devotion to his college friend struck Dick every day as something truly remarkable. Brothers are so dense. Maud smiled at him often. If he had paid a quarter the attention to any other girl that Archie paid her, how instantly she would have perceived it! But Dick—dear Dick—never seemed to suspect that Archie could come for anything else on earth except to talk over the affairs of the family with him. And yet men consider women the inferior creatures!
Much of Dick\'s spare time, however—for, being a very busy man, of course he had often spare time on his hands, amounting frequently to as much as half an hour together—was spent in a curious yet congenial occupation—the laborious hunting-up of the Plantagenet pedigree. A certain insane desire to connect his family with the old Royal House of England pursued Dick through life, and made him look upon this purely useless and ornamental object as though it were a matter of the gravest practical importance. Maud felt its gravity, too, quite as much as her brother; it was an almost inevitable result, indeed, of their peculiar upbringing.
Every man has, necessarily, what the French call, well, \'the defects of his qualities\'—faults which are either the correlatives or the excess of his particular virtues. Now, the Plantagenets had preserved their strong sense of self-respect and many other valuable personal characteristics under trying circumstances, by dint of this self-same family pride. It was almost necessary, therefore, that when Dick found himself in a position to prove, as he thought, the goodness of his claim to represent in our day the old Plantagenet stock, he should prosecute the research after the missing links with all the innate energy of his active nature.
Mary Tudor, indeed, whose practical common-sense was of a different order, sometimes regretted that Dick should waste so much valuable time on so unimportant an object; to her it seemed a pity that a man whose days were mainly spent in poring over dusty documents in the public service should devote a large part of his evenings as well to poring over other equally dusty documents for a personal and purely sentimental purpose.
\'What good will it do you, Dick, even if you do find out you\'re the rightful heir to the throne of England?\' she asked him more than once. \'Parliament won\'t repeal the Acts of union with Scotland and Ireland, and get rid of the Settlement, to make you King and Maud and Nellie Princesses of the blood royal.\'
Dick admitted that was so; but, still, her frivolity shocked him.
\'It\'s a noble inheritance!\' he said, with a touch of romance in his voice. \'Surely, Mary, you wouldn\'t wish me to remain insensible, like a log, to the proud distinction of so unique an ancestry! They were such men, those old Plantagenets! Look at Henry II., for example, who founded our House for most practical purposes; there was a wonderful organizer for you! And Edward I.—what a statesman! so far before his age! and the Black Prince—and Edward III.—and Henry V., what strategists! It isn\'t merely that they were kings, mind you; I don\'t care about that; since I came to know what really makes a man great, I haven\'t attached so much importance to the mere fact of their position. But just see what workers the old Plantagenets were in themselves, and how much they did for the building-up of England—and, indeed, of all Britain, if it comes to that, for wasn\'t Scotch independence itself a direct result of the national opposition to Edward Plantagenet\'s premature policy of unification? When I think of all those things I feel a glow of pride; I realize to myself what a grand heritage it is to be the descendant and representative of such early giants; for there were giants in those days, and no man could then be King unless he had at least a strenuous personality—oftenest, too, unless he were also a real live statesman. Our ancestors themselves knew all that very well; and when one of our line fell short of his ancestral standard, like Edward II. and Richard II., he went soon to the wall, and made way for a stronger. It\'s not about them I care, nor about mere puling devotees like poor Henry III.; it\'s my descent from men like those great early organizers, and thinkers, and rulers, who built up the administrative and judicial system we all still live under.\'
When he talked like that, Maud thought it was really beautiful. She wondered how Mary could ever be insensible to the romantic charms of such old descent. But there! Mary wasn\'t a Plantagenet—only a mere Welsh Tudor; and though she was a dear good girl, and as sweet as they\'re made, how could you expect her to enter fully into the feelings of the real old family? As for Archie Gillespie, he said to Mary more than once:
\'Let Dick go his own way, Miss Tudor; it gives him pleasure. He thinks some mysterious good is going to come out of it all for him and his, if he can fill in the missing links in the Plantagenet pedigree. Of course, that\'s pure moonshine. Still, we must always remember it was the Plantagonet pedigree that gave our Dick his first interest in English history, and so made him what he is; and anything deserves respect which could keep Edmund Plantagenet\'s children from degenerating, as they would have degenerated, from their father\'s example, without this inspiriting idea of noblesse oblige: an idea which has made Dick and Maud—I mean, Miss Plantagenet—hold their heads high through life in spite of their poverty. It can do Dick no harm now to pursue a little farther this innocent hobby; it will give him a better insight into the by-ways and alleys of early English history; and if he can really establish the Plantagenet pedigree throughout, it may serve to call attention to him as a sound historical researcher. Fortunately, he knows what evidence is; and he won\'t go wrong, therefore, by making heedless assumptions and incredible skips and jumps, like half our genealogists.\'
So Dick persevered for fully twelve months in his eager attempt, by hook and by crook, to trace his own family up to Lionel of Clarence, upon whom Mr. Plantagenet himself had early fixed—at pure haphazard—as the special transmitter of the Plantagenet blood to the later branches of the House, himself included. The longer Dick worked at it, too, the more confident he became of ultimate success. Step by step turned out right. He had brought the thing down, he told Mary, to a moral certainty; only one link now remained to complete the entire pedigree. That\'s always the way, it may be mentioned parenthetically, with your doubtful genealogy; there\'s only one link missing—but, unfortunately, that\'s the link on proof of which the whole chain is dependent. And very naturally, too: for this is how the thing works out. You track your own genealogy, let us say, back to a person named Plantagenet, who lived some time in the sixteenth century, and with whom you are really and undoubtedly connected by an unbroken and traceable ancestral series. Then you track the family tree of Lionel of Clarence forward, in the opposite direction, to a real and historical Plantagenet who \'flourished,\' as the books say, near the end of the fifteenth century. After that you say: \'If my ancestor, the sixteenth-century Plantagenet, turns out to be the son of Lionel\'s descendant in the fifteenth century—as is extremely probable—why, then, it\'s all made out—I\'m descended direct from Lionel of Clarence; and in any case, don\'t you see, there\'s only one link missing!\' Wise genealogists usually abstain on purpose from the attempt to hunt up that fatal missing link; they know right well that the safest plan is to assume identity, while efforts at proving it are frequently disastrous. But Dick was still young, and not perhaps overwise; so once he had brought down the matter to a question of a solitary missing link, he couldn\'t rest night or day till he had finally settled it.
One evening he returned home from the office to Maud, overflowing with a new and most important discovery.
\'Well, the thing\'s all but proved, at last!\' he cried in a triumphant voice, as he kissed her warmly; \'at least, that is to say, I\'ve found a valuable clue that will decide the matter finally one way or the other. I\'ve discovered a conveyance of the sixteenth century, dated 1533—here\'s a verbatim copy of it—which describes Thomas Plantagenet, our great-great-grandfather\'s grandfather, as being really the son of Giles Plantagenet, the missing-link man, who is said in it to have owned a house—and this, you will see, is the new and important point—at Framlingham, in Suffolk. He seems to have been some sort of a petty tradesman.
Where Giles first came from, w............