Dick trembled like a girl. His heart jumped within him.
'Why, what have I got?' he asked, hardly daring even to ask it, lest he should find himself mistaken.
The man with the red beard held out a duplicate copy of the paper on the notice-board.
'You can see for yourself,' he answered; and Dick looked at it much agitated.
'Modern History: Mr. Richard Plantagenet, late of Chiddingwick Grammar School, is elected to a Scholarship of the annual value of One Hundred Pounds. Proximo accessit, Mr. Trevor Gillingham, of Rugby School. Mr. Gillingham is offered a set of rooms, rent free, in the College.'
The world reeled round and round on Dick as a pivot. It was too good to be true. He couldn't even now believe it. Of what happened next he never had any clear or connected recollection. In some vague phantasmagoric fashion he was dimly aware of being taken by the Tutor into the College Hall and introduced by name to a bland-looking effigy in a crimson gown, supposed to represent the Head of the College; after which it seemed to him that somebody made him sign a large book of statutes or something of the sort in medieval Latin, wherein he described himself as 'Plantagenet, Ricardus, gen. fil., hujus ædis alumnus,' and that somebody else informed him in the same tongue he was duly elected. And then he bowed himself out in what Mr. Plantagenet the elder would have considered a painfully inadequate manner, and disappeared with brimming eyes into the front quadrangle.
As yet he had scarcely begun to be faintly conscious of a vague sense of elation and triumph; but as he reached the open air, which freshened and revived him, it occurred to him all at once that now he was really to all practical intents and purposes an Oxford undergraduate, one of those very people whose gorgeous striped blazers and lordly manners had of late so overawed him. Would he ever himself wear such noble neckties? Would he sport a straw hat with a particoloured ribbon? He looked up at the big window of that beautiful chapel, with its flamboyant tracery, and felt forthwith a proprietary interest in it. By the door Faussett was standing. As Dick passed he looked up and recognised 'the dark horse,' the rank outsider. He came forward and took his hand, which he wrung with unfeigned admiration.
'By Jove, Plantagenet,' he cried, 'you've licked us; you've fairly licked us! It's wonderful, old man. I didn't think you'd have done it. The Poet's such an extraordinary dab, you know, at history. But you must be a dabber. Look here, I say, what a pity you didn't take me the other day when I offered even money on Trev against the field! You simply chucked away a good chance of a fiver.'
A little further on, Gillingham himself strolled up to them. His manner was pure gold. There was no trace of jealousy in the way he seized his unexpected rival's hand. To do him justice, indeed, that smallest and meanest of the human passions had no place at all in the Born Poet's nature.
'Well, I congratulate you,' he said with a passing pang of regret—for he, too, had wished not a little to get that Scholarship; 'as Sir Philip Sidney said, your need was the greater. And even for myself I'm not wholly dissatisfied. It's been a disappointment to me—and I don't very often secure the luxury of a disappointment. The true poet, you see, ought to have felt and known every human passion, good, bad or indifferent. As pure; experience, therefore, I'm not sorry you've licked me. It will enable me to throw myself henceforth more dramatically and realistically into the position of the vanquished, which is always the more pathetic, and therefore the more poetical.'