'I floored Jacopo Nardi,' he remarked with a genial smile, 'and I simply polished off the Edict of Rostock.'
Dick, more despondent, went through it in detail, confessing with shame to entire ignorance of more than one important matter.
'Oh, the Poet wins!' Faussett exclaimed, with deep admiration. 'He wins in a canter. I tell you, it's no use any other fellow going in when the Poet's in the field. It's Gillingham first, and the rest nowhere. He knows his books, you see. He's a fearful pro. at them.'
'Perhaps there's a dark horse, though,' Gillingham suggested, smiling. 'The Prince of the Blood may hold the lists, after all, against all comers.'
'Perhaps so,' Faussett answered with a short little laugh. 'But I'll back the Rugby lot against the field, all the same, for a fiver. The rest are rank outsiders. Even money on the Poet! Now, gentlemen, now's your chance! The Poet for a fiver! even money on the Poet--the Poet wins! “Who'll back the Plantagenet?”'
Dick coloured to the very roots of his hair; he felt himself beaten in the race beforehand. Oh, why had he ever come up to this glorious, impossible place at all? And why did he ever confide the secret of his intentions to the imprudent head of the house of Plantagenet?
That day and the next day it was always the same. He sat and bit his pen, and looked hard at the questions, and waited for inspiration that never seemed to come; while Gillingham, the brilliant, the omniscient, the practical, fully equipped at all points, went on and wrote--wrote, scratching his foolscap noisily with a hurrying pen, straight through the paper. Dick envied him his fluency his readiness, his rapidity; the Born Poet kept his knowledge all packed for immediate use at the ends of his fingers, and seemed able to pour it forth, on no matter what topic, the very instant he required it. Words came to him quick as thought; he never paused for a second. Before the end of the examination Dick had long ago given up all for lost, and only went on writing at the papers at all from a dogged sense that it ill became a Plantagenet to admit he was beaten as long as a drop of blood or a whiff of breath remained in his body.
The three days of the examination passed slowly away, and each day Dick felt even more dissatisfied with his work than he had felt on the previous one. On the very last evening he indited a despondent letter to Maud, so as to break the disappointment for her gently, explaining how unequally he was matched with this clever fellow Gillingham, whom all Rugby regarded with unanimous voice as a heaven-sent genius, a natural historian, and a Born Poet. After which, with many sighs, he betook himself once more for the twentieth time to the study of the questions he had answered worst, wondering how on earth he could ever have made that stupid blunder about Aidan and the Synod of Whitby, and what could have induced him to suppose for one second that Peter of Amboise was really the same person as Peter the Hermit.. With these and other like errors he made his soul miserable that live-long night; and he worried himself with highly-coloured mental pictures of the disgrace he would feel it to return to Chiddingwick, no Oxford man at all, but a bookseller's assistant.