The Eagle's Shadow, James Branch Cabell [best manga ereader txt] 📗

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 assented. Afterward, turning north from the front
court, they descended past the shield-bearing griffins--and you may
depend upon it that each shield 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 passed 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 assented, 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 advertisement it would
be for your poems!"


[Illustration: "'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 space 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 cockatrice, 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 noble 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 assure 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 fashion 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 assured 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 worship her! I simply cannot explain the perfectly
unreasonable way in which I worship 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 assented. "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 cocked
his head on one side. "You see," he added, whimsically, "I was
sufficiently a conceited ass 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 fashion!" 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. Nobody--nobody," 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.

Kennaston had meant a deal to her, you see; he had been the one
man she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib
artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere
pinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart
a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston. The
thought nauseated her.

"My dear," he answered, kindly, "you will have any number of friends
now that you are poor. It was merely your money that kept you from
having any. You see," Mr. Kennaston went on, with somewhat the air of
one climbing upon his favourite hobby, "money is the only thing
that counts nowadays. In America, the rich are necessarily our only
aristocracy. It is quite natural. One cannot hope for an aristocracy
of intellect, if only for the reason that not one person in a thousand
has any; and birth does not count for much. Of course, it is quite
true that all of our remote ancestors came over with William the
Conqueror--I have sometimes thought that the number of steerage
passengers his ships would accommodate must have been little short of
marvellous--but it is equally true that the grandfathers of most of
our leisure class were either deserving or dishonest persons--who
either started life on a farm, and studied Euclid by the firelight and
did all the other priggish things they thought would look well in a
biography, or else met with marked success in embezzlement. So money,
after all, is our only standard; and when a woman is as rich as you
were yesterday she cannot hope