The Eagle's Shadow Part 22

All this time the young people saw nothing of one another. On this point Jeal was adamantean.

"In a sick-room," he vehemently declared, "a woman is well enough, but _the_ woman is the devil and all. I've told that young man plainly, sir, that he doesn't see your daughter till he gets well--and, by George, sir, he'll get well now just in order to see her. Nature is the only doctor who ever cures anybody, Colonel; we humans, for all our pill-boxes and lancets, can only prompt her--and devilish demoralising advice we generally give her, too," he added, with a chuckle.

"Peggy!"

This was the first observation of Mr. Woods when he came to his senses. He swore feebly when Peggy was denied to him. He pleaded. He scolded. He even threatened, as a last resort, to get out of bed and go in immediate search of her; and in return, Jeal told him very affably that it was far less difficult to manage a patient in a straight-jacket than one out of it, and that personally nothing would please him so much as a plausible pretext for clapping Mr. Woods into one of 'em. Jeal had his own methods in dealing with the fractious.

Then Billy clamoured for Colonel Hugonin, and subsequently the Colonel came in some bewilderment to his daughter's rooms.

"Billy says that will ain't to be probated," he informed her, testily.

"I'm to make sure it ain't probated till he gets well. You're to give me your word you'll do nothing further in the matter till Billy gets well. That's his message, and I'd like to know what the devil this infernal nonsense means. I ain't a Fenian nor yet a Guy Fawkes, daughter, and in consequence I'm free to confess I don't care for all this d.a.m.n mystery and s.h.i.+lly-shallying. But that's the message."

Miss Hugonin debated with herself. "That I will do nothing further in the matter till Billy gets well," she repeated, reflectively. "Yes, I suppose I'll have to promise it, but you can tell him for me that I consider he is _horrid_, and just as obstinate and selfish as he can _possibly_ be. Can you remember that, attractive?"

"Yes, thank you," said the Colonel. "I can remember it, but I ain't going to. Nice sort of message to send a sick man, ain't it? I don't know what's gotten into you, Margaret--no, begad, I don't! I think you're possessed of seventeen devils. And now," the old gentleman demanded, after an awkward pause, "are you or are you not going to tell me what all this mystery is about?"

"I can't," Miss Hugonin protested. "It--it's a secret, attractive."

"It ain't," said the Colonel, flatly--"it's some more d.a.m.n foolishness." And he went away in a fret and using language.

x.x.xII

Left to herself, Miss Hugonin meditated.

Miss Hugonin was in her kimono.

And oh, Madame Chrysastheme! oh, Madame b.u.t.terfly! Oh, Mimosa San, and Pitti Sing, and Yum Yum, and all ye vaunted beauties of j.a.pan! if you could have seen her in that garb! Poor little ladies of the Orient, how hopelessly you would have wrung your henna-stained fingers! Poor little Ichabods of the East, whose glory departed irretrievably when she adopted this garment, I tremble to think of the heart-burnings and palpitations and hari-karis that would have ensued.

It was pink--the pink of her cheeks to a shade. And scattered about it were birds, and b.u.t.terflies, and snaky, emaciated dragons, with backs like saw-teeth, and prodigious fangs, and claws, and very curly tails, such as they breed in Nankeen plates and used to breed on packages of fire-crackers--all done in gold, the gold of her hair. Moreover, one might catch a glimpse of her neck--which was a manifest favour of the G.o.ds--and about it mysterious, lacy white things intermingling with divers tiny blue ribbons. I saw her in it once--by accident.

And now I fancy, as she stood rigid with indignation, her cheeks flushed, it must have been a heady spectacle to note how their sh.e.l.l-pink repeated the pink of her fantastic garment like a chromatic echo; and how her sunny hair, a thought loosened, a shade dishevelled, clung heavily about her face, a golden snare for eye and heart; and how her own eyes, enormous, cerulean--twin sapphires such as in the old days might have ransomed a brace of emperors--grew wistful like a child's who has been punished and does not know exactly why; and how her petulant mouth quivered and the long black lashes, golden at the roots, quivered, too--ah, yes, it must have been a heady spectacle.

"_Now_," she announced, "I see plainly what he intends doing. He is going to destroy that will, and burden me once more with a large and influential fortune. I don't want it, and I won't take it, and he might just as well understand that in the very beginning. I don't care if Uncle Fred did leave it to me--I didn't ask him to, did I? Besides, he was a very foolish old man--if he had left the money to Billy _everything_ would have been all right. That's always the way--my dolls are invariably stuffed with sawdust, and I _never_ have a dear gazelle to glad me with his dappled hide, but when he comes to know me well he falls upon the b.u.t.tered side--or something to that effect. I hate poetry, anyhow--it's so mushy!"

And this from the Miss Hugonin who a week ago was interested in the French _decadents_ and partial to folk-songs from the Romaic! I think we may fairly deduce that the reign of Felix Kennaston is over. The king is dead; and Margaret's thoughts and affections and her very dreams have fallen loyally to crying, Long live the king--his Majesty Billy the First.

"Oh!" said Margaret, with an indignant gasp, what time her eyebrows gesticulated, "I think Billy Woods is a meddlesome _piece_!--that's what I think! Does he suppose that after waiting all this time for the only man in the world who can keep me interested for four hours on a stretch and send my pulse up to a hundred and make me feel those thrilly thrills I've always longed for--does he suppose that now I'm going to pay any attention to his silly notions about wills and things? He's abominably selfis.h.!.+ I shan't!"

Margaret moved across the room, s.h.i.+mmering, rustling, glittering like a fairy in a pantomime. Then, to consider matters at greater ease, she curled up on a divan in much the att.i.tude of a tiny Cleopatra riding at anchor on a carpeted Cydnus.

"Billy thinks I want the money--bless his boots! He thinks I'm a stuck-up, grasping, purse-proud little pig, and he has every right to think so after the way I talked to him, though he ought to have realised I was in a temper about Kathleen Saumarez and have paid no attention to what I said. And he actually attempted to reason with me! If he'd had _any_ consideration for my feelings, he'd have simply smacked me and made me behave--however, he's a man, and all men are selfish, and _she's_ a skinny old thing, and I _never_ had any use for her. Bother her lectures! I never understood a word of them, and I don't believe she does, either. Women's clubs are _all_ silly, and I think the women who belong to them are _all_ bold-faced jigs! If they had any sense, they'd stay at home and take care of the babies, instead of messing with philanthropy, and education, and theosophy, and anything else that they can't make head or tail of. And they call that being cultured! Culture!--I hate the word! I don't want to be cultured--I want to be happy."

This, you will observe, was, in effect, a sweeping recantation of every ideal Margaret had ever boasted. But Love is a canny pedagogue, and of late he had instructed Miss Hugonin in a variety of matters.

"Before G.o.d, loving you as I do, I wouldn't marry you for all the wealth in the world," she repeated, with a little s.h.i.+ver. "Even in his delirium he said that. But I _know_ now that he loves me. And I know that I adore him. And if this were a sensible world, I'd walk right in there and explain things and ask him to marry me, and then it wouldn't matter in the least who had the money. But I can't, because it wouldn't be proper. Bother propriety!--but bothering it doesn't do any good. As long as I have the money, Billy will never come near me, because of the idiotic way I talked to him. And he's bent on my taking the money simply because it happens to belong to me. I consider that a very silly reason. I'll _make_ Billy Woods take the money, and I'll make him see that I'm _not_ a little pig, and that I trust him implicitly. And I think I'm quite justified in using a little--we'll call it diplomacy--because otherwise he'd go back to France or some other objectionable place, and we'd both be _very_ unhappy."

Margaret began to laugh softly. "I've given him my word that I'll do nothing further in the matter till he gets well. And I won't.

_But_----"

Miss Hugonin rose from the divan with a gesture of sweeping back her hair. And then--oh, treachery of tortoise-sh.e.l.l! oh, the villainy of those little gold hair-pins!--the fat twisted coils tumbled loose and slowly unravelled themselves, and her pink-and-white face, half-eclipsed, showed a delectable wedge between big, odourful, crinkly, ponderous ma.s.ses of hair. It clung about her, a heavy cloak, all s.h.i.+mmering gold like the path of sunset over the June sea. And Margaret, looking at herself in the mirror, laughed, and appeared perfectly content with what she saw there.

"But," said she, "if the Fates are kind to me--and I sometimes think I _have_ a pull with the G.o.ds--I'll make you happy, Billy Woods, in spite of yourself."

The mirror flashed back a smile. Margaret was strangely interested in the mirror.

"She has ringlets in her hair," sang Margaret happily--a low, half-hushed little song. She held up a strand of it to demonstrate this fact.

"There's a dimple in her chin"--and, indeed, there was. And a dimple in either cheek, too.

For a long time afterward she continued to smile at the mirror. I am afraid Kathleen Saumarez was right. She was a vain little cat, was Margaret.

But, barring a rearrangement of the cosmic scheme, I dare say maids will continue to delight in their own comeliness so long as mirrors speak truth. Let us, then, leave Miss Hugonin to this innocent diversion. The staidest of us are conscious of a brisk elation at sight of a pretty face; and surely no considerate person will deny its owner a portion of the pleasure that daily she accords the beggar at the street-corner.

x.x.xIII

We are credibly informed that Time travels in divers paces with divers persons--the statement being made by a lady who may be considered to speak with some authority, having triumphantly withstood the ravages of Chronos for a matter of three centuries. But I doubt if even the insolent sweet wit of Rosalind could have devised a fitting simile for Time's gait at Selwoode those five days that Billy lay abed. Margaret could not but marvel at the flouris.h.i.+ng proportion attained by the hours in those sunlit spring days; and at dinner, say, her thoughts harking back to luncheon, recalled it by a vigorous effort as an affair of the dim yester-years--a mere blurred memory, faint and vague as a Druidical tenet or a Merovingian squabble.

But the time pa.s.sed for all that; and eventually--it was just before dusk--she came, with Martin Jeal's permission, into the room where Billy was. And beside the big open fireplace, where a wood fire chattered companionably, sat a very pallid Billy, a rather thin Billy, with a great many bandages about his head.

You may depend upon it, Margaret was not looking her worst that afternoon. By actual count, Celestine had done her hair six times before reaching an acceptable result.

And, "Yes, Celestine, you may get out that pale yellow dress. No, beautiful, the one with the black satin stripes on the bodice--because I don't want my hair cast completely in the shade, do I? Now, let me see--black feather, gloves, large pompadour, _and_ a sweet smile. No, I don't want a fan--that's a Lydia Languish trade-mark. And _two_ silk skirts rustling like the deadest leaves imaginable. Yes, I think that will do. And if you can't hook up my dress without pecking and pecking at me like that, I'll probably go stark, _staring_ crazy, Celestine, and then you'll be sorry. No, it isn't a bit tight--are you perfectly certain there's no powder behind my ears, Celestine? Now, _please_ try to fasten the collar without pulling all my hair down. Ye-es, I think that will do, Celestine. Well, it's very nice of you to say so, but I don't believe I much fancy myself in yellow, after all."

Equipped and armed for conquest, then, she came into the room with a very tolerable affectation of unconcern. Altogether, it was a quite effective entrance.

"I've been for a little drive, Billy," she mendaciously informed him.

"That's how you happen to have the opportunity of seeing me in all my nice new store-clothes. Aren't you pleased, Billy? No, don't you dare get up!" Margaret stood across the room, peeling off her gloves and regarding him on the whole with disapproval. "They've been starving you," she pensively reflected. "As soon as that Jeal person goes away, I shall have six little beefsteaks cooked and see to it personally that you eat every one of them. And I'll cook a cherry pie--quick as a cat can wink her eye--won't I, Billy? That Jeal person is a decided nuisance," said Miss Hugonin, as she stabbed her hat rather viciously with two hat-pins and then laid it aside on a table.

Billy Woods was looking up at her forlornly. It hurt her to see the love and sorrow in his face. But oh, how avidly his soul drank in the modulations of that longed-for voice--a voice that was honey and gold and velvet and all that is most sweet and rich and soft in the world.

"Peggy," said he, plunging at the heart of things, "where's that will?"

Miss Hugonin kicked forward a little foot-stool to the other side of the fire, and sat down and complacently smoothed out her skirts.

"I knew it!" said she. "I never saw such a one-idea'd person in my life. I knew that would be the very first thing you would ask for, Billy Woods, because you're such an obstinate, stiffnecked _donkey_.

Very well!"--and Margaret tossed her head--"here's Uncle Fred's will, then, and you can do _exactly_ as you like with it, and _now_ I hope you're satisfied!" And Margaret handed him the long envelope which lay in her lap.

Mr. Woods promptly opened it.

"That," Miss Hugonin commented, "is what I term very unladylike behaviour on your part."

"You evidently don't trust me, Billy Woods. Very well! I don't care!

Read it carefully--very carefully, and make quite sure I haven't been dabbling in forgery of late--besides, it's so good for your eyes, you know, after being hit over the head," Margaret suggested, cheerfully.