The Eagle's Shadow Part 14

Mr. Woods inquired of her, the last word being rather obviously an afterthought.

"No," said she. "Not if you must--dear."

Billy went away, lugging a heart of lead in his breast.

Kathleen stared after him and gave a hard, wringing motion of her hands. She had done what many women do daily; the thing is common and sensible and universally commended; but in her own eyes, the draggled trollop of the pavements was neither better nor worse than she.

At the entrance of the next walkway Billy encountered Felix Kennaston--alone and in the most ebulliently mirthful of humours.

XX

But we had left Mr. Kennaston, I think, in company with Miss Hugonin, at the precise moment she inquired of him whether it were not the strangest thing in the world--referring thereby to the sudden manner in which she had been disinherited.

The poet laughed and a.s.sented. Afterward, turning north from the front court, they descended past the s.h.i.+eld-bearing griffins--and you may depend upon it that each s.h.i.+eld is adorned with a bas-relief of the Eagle--that guard the broad stairway leading to the formal gardens of Selwoode. The gardens stretch northward to the confines of Peter Blagden's estate of Gridlington; and for my part--unless it were that primitive garden that Adam lost--I can imagine no goodlier place.

On this particular forenoon, however, neither Miss Hugonin nor Felix Kennaston had eyes for its comeliness; silently they braved the griffins, and in silence they skirted the fish-pond--silver-crinkling in the May morning--and pa.s.sed through cloistral ilex-shadowed walks, and amphitheatres of green velvet, and terraces ample and mellow in the sunlight, silently. The trees pelted them with blossoms; pedestaled in leafy recesses, Satyrs grinned at them apishly, and the arrows of divers pot-bellied Cupids threatened them, and Fauns piped for them ditties of no tone; the birds were about shrill avocations overhead, and everywhere the heatless, odourful air was a caress; but for all this, Miss Hugonin and Mr. Kennaston were silent and very fidgetty.

Margaret was hatless--and the glory of the eminently sensible spring sun appeared to centre in her hair--and violet-clad; and the gown, like most of her gowns, was all tiny tucks and frills and flounces, diapered with semi-transparencies--unsubstantial, foam-like, mere violet froth. As she came starry-eyed through the gardens, the impudent wind trifling with her hair, I protest she might have been some lady of Oberon's court stolen out of Elfland to bedevil us poor mortals, with only a moonbeam for the changeable heart of her, and for raiment a violet shadow spirited from the under side of some big, fleecy cloud.

They came presently through a trim, yew-hedged walkway to a summer-house covered with vines, into which Margaret peeped and declined to enter, on the ground that it was entirely too chilly and gloomy and _exactly_ like a mausoleum; but nearby they found a semi-circular marble bench about which a group of elm-trees made a pleasant shadow splashed at just the proper intervals with sunlight.

On this Margaret seated herself; and then pensively moved to the other end of the bench, because a slanting sunbeam fell there. Since it was absolutely necessary to blast Mr. Kennaston's dearest hopes, she thoughtfully endeavoured to distract his attention from his own miseries--as far as might be possible--by showing him how exactly like an aureole her hair was in the sunlight. Margaret always had a kind heart.

Kennaston stood before her, smiling a little. He was the sort of man to appreciate the manoeuver.

"My lady," he asked, very softly, "haven't you any good news for me on this wonderful morning?"

"Excellent news," Margaret a.s.sented, with a cheerfulness that was not utterly free from trepidation. "I've decided not to marry you, beautiful, and I trust you're properly grateful. You see, you're very nice, of course, but I'm going to marry somebody else, and bigamy is a crime, you know; and, anyhow, I'm only a pauper, and you'd never be able to put up with my temper--now, beautiful, I'm quite sure you couldn't, so there's not a bit of use in arguing it. Some day you'd end by strangling me, which would be horribly disagreeable for me, and then they'd hang you for it, you know, and that would be equally disagreeable for you. Fancy, though, what a good advertis.e.m.e.nt it would be for your poems!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'My lady,' he asked, very softly, 'haven't you any good news for me on this wonderful morning?'"]

She was not looking at him now--oh, no, Margaret was far too busily employed getting the will (which she had carried all this time) into an absurd little silver chain-bag hanging at her waist. She had no time to look at Felix Kennaston. There was such scant room in the bag; her purse took up so much s.p.a.ce there was scarcely any left for the folded paper; the affair really required her closest, undivided attention. Besides, she had not the least desire to look at Kennaston just now.

"Beautiful child," he pleaded, "look at me!"

But she didn't.

She felt that at that moment she could have looked at a gorgon, say, or a c.o.c.katrice, or any other trifle of that nature with infinitely greater composure. The pause that followed Margaret accordingly devoted to a scrutiny of his shoes and sincere regret that their owner was not a mercenary man who would be glad to be rid of her.

"Beautiful child," spoke the poet's voice, sadly, "you aren't--surely, you aren't saying this in mistaken kindness to me? Surely, you aren't saying this because of what has happened in regard to your money affairs? Believe me, my dear, that makes no difference to me. It is you I love--you, the woman of my heart--and not a certain, and doubtless desirable, amount of metal disks and dirty paper."

"Now I suppose you're going to be very n.o.ble and very nasty about it,"

observed Miss Hugonin, resentfully. "That's my main objection to you, you know, that you haven't any faults I can recognise and feel familiar and friendly with."

"My dear," he protested, "I a.s.sure you I am not intentionally disagreeable."

At that, she raised velvet eyes to his--with a visible effort, though--and smiled.

"I know you far too well to think that," she said, wistfully. "I know I'm not worthy of you. I'm tremendously fond of you, beautiful, but--but, you see, I love somebody else," Margaret concluded, with admirable candour.

"Ah!" said he, in a rather curious voice. "The painter chap, eh?"

Then Margaret's face flamed in a wonderful glow of shame and happiness and pride that must have made the surrounding roses very hopelessly jealous. A quaint mothering look, sacred, divine, Madonna-like, woke in her great eyes as she thought--remorsefully--of how unhappy Billy must be at that very moment and of how big he was and of his general niceness; and she desired, very heartily, that this fleshy young man would make his scene and have done with it. Who was he, forsooth, to keep her from Billy? She wished she had never heard of Felix Kennaston.

_Souvent femme varie_, my brothers.

However, "Yes," said Margaret..

"You are a dear," said Mr. Kennaston, with conviction in his voice.

I dare say Margaret was surprised.

But the poet had taken her hand and had kissed it reverently, and then sat down beside her, twisting one foot under him in a fas.h.i.+on he had.

He was frankly grateful to her for refusing him; and, the mask of affectation slipped, she saw in him another man.

"I am an out-and-out fraud," he confessed, with the gayest of smiles.

"I am not in love with you, and I am inexpressibly glad that you are not in love with me. Oh, Margaret, Margaret--you don't mind if I call you that, do you? I shall have to, in any event, because I like you so tremendously now that we are not going to be married--you have no idea what a night I spent."

"I consider it most peculiar and unsympathetic of my hair not to have turned gray. I thought you were going to have me, you see."

Margaret was far to much astonished to be angry.

"But last night!" she presently echoed, in candid surprise. "Why, last night you didn't know I was poor!"

He wagged a protesting forefinger. "That made no earthly difference,"

he a.s.sured her. "Of course, it was the money--and in some degree the moon--that induced me to make love to you. I acted on the impulse of the moment; just for an instant, the novelty of doing a perfectly sensible thing--and marrying money is universally conceded to come under that head--appealed to me. So I did it. But all the time I was in love with Kathleen Saumarez. Why, the moment I left you, I began to realise that not even you--and you are quite the most fascinating and generally adorable woman I ever knew, Margaret--I began to realise, I say, that not even you could ever make me forget that fact. And I was very properly miserable. It is extremely queer," Mr. Kennaston continued, after an interval of meditation, "but falling in love appears to be the one utterly inexplicable, utterly reasonless thing one ever does in one's life. You can usually think of some more or less plausible palliation for embezzlement, say, or for robbing a cathedral or even for committing suicide--but no man can ever explain how he happened to fall in love. He simply did it."

Margaret nodded sagely. She knew.

"Now you," Mr. Kennaston was pleased to say, "are infinitely more beautiful, younger, more clever, and in every way more attractive than Kathleen. I recognise these things clearly, but it does not appear, somehow, to alter the fact that I am in love with her. I think I have been in love with her all my life. We were boy and girl together, Margaret, and--and I give you my word," Kennaston cried, with his boyish flush, "I wors.h.i.+p her! I simply cannot explain the perfectly unreasonable way in which I wors.h.i.+p her!"

He was sincere. He loved Kathleen Saumarez as much as he was capable of loving any one--almost as much as he loved to dilate on his own peculiarities and emotions.

Margaret's gaze was intent upon him. "Yet," she marvelled, "you made love to me very tropically."

With unconcealed pride, Mr. Kennaston a.s.sented. "Didn't I?" he said.

"I was in rather good form last night, I thought."

"And you were actually prepared to marry me?" she asked--"even after you knew I was poor?"

"I couldn't very well back out," he submitted, and then c.o.c.ked his head on one side. "You see," he added, whimsically, "I was sufficiently a conceited a.s.s to fancy you cared a little for me. So, of course, I was going to marry you and try to make you happy. But how dear--oh, how unutterably dear it was of you, Margaret, to decline to be made happy in any such fas.h.i.+on!" And Mr. Kennaston paused to chuckle and to regard her with genuine esteem and affection.

But still her candid eyes weighed him, and transparently found him wanting.

"You are thinking, perhaps, what an unutterable cad I have been?" he suggested.

"Yes--you are rather by way of being a cad, beautiful. But I can't help liking you, somehow. I dare say it's because you're honest with me. n.o.body--n.o.body," Miss Hugonin lamented, a forlorn little quiver in her voice, "_ever_ seemed to be honest with me except you, and now I know you weren't. Oh, beautiful, aren't I ever to have any real friends?" she pleaded, wistfully.