The Heir
9781465664976
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“I really feel quite guilty,” said the Master of St Saviour’s College to the distinguished foreigner whom he was escorting to the Senate House.“Your time in Cambridge is so short that every moment must be needed for your work.” “Pray do not reproach yourself, sir,” replied Professor Panagiotis, with the deliberate precision of one who has learned English from books. “What greater honour could be afforded me than permission to observe the contests of your youthful heroes for the rewards of poetry and oratory?” “You mustn’t expect too much,” said the Master, with some anxiety; “though if it had been merely the usual recitation of prize exercises, I should have left you in peace in the Library. But the subject of the English Poem has such a close connection with that of your great book—not, of course, that it was intentionally chosen; merely a coincidence,” he added conscientiously—“that I felt you ought to be present.” “I am entirely agreed with you,” responded the author of the famous German work on the fall of the Eastern Empire, wondering why his host was so determined not to let him see a compliment where none was meant.“The subject, then, is historical?” “The Fall of Czarigrad,” replied the Master, “and the medal has come to a St Saviour’s man, which has not happened for many years. I understand that he studied your book very carefully before writing his poem, and that is my reason for dragging you here.” It was in the Professor’s mind to wish that his book had not been studied, as he sat in the Senate House and heard various agitated young men, their faces vying sometimes with the white of the M.A. hoods and sometimes with the Doctors’ scarlet, declaim compositions in various languages, with all the grace and dignity to be expected from extreme nervousness subject to the perpetual encouragement of well-meaning friends. Latin the Professor despised, and the Cambridge Greek, from the difference of pronunciation, he scarcely recognised as his own language, but the English Poem roused in him a certain amount of interest, though he felt a mighty longing to relieve the author of the task of reciting it. The medallist was fortunate in being pale, and not red, for Professor Panagiotis considered blushing a purely feminine exercise, but he shared with his fellows the English incapacity for letting himself go. In his most thrilling passages the note of shamed self-consciousness was clearly audible, and he endured the applause accorded him with a stolid resignation that seemed to inquire why he could not be allowed to perform a distasteful duty in peace. This was the more irritating to Professor Panagiotis because the poem, whenever he could catch the words, struck him as remarkable. The author had chosen as his theme the final day in the long struggle of the Cross against the Crescent, when the Moslem tide overflowed at last the grand bulwark of Christendom, and the Emperor John Theophanis fell fighting as a common soldier in the breach. The recital was placed in the mouth of the Emperor, and the description of the night’s vigil, the dawn of the fatal day, the fanatic fury of the assault, the desertion of the Christian cause by its allies, and the last desperate fight, into which Theophanis was to hurl himself, determined to perish, impressed the listener with a curious sense of realism. He had lived for months and years among the records of these scenes, but he could not have described them with the sure hand of this undergraduate. The tale was plain and unvarnished, the telling crude and bald, but as the fragmentary lines, unassisted by any rhetorical graces in the reciter, reached the hearer, he felt such a thrill as the unadorned narrative of an eyewitness might produce.
