_ CHAPTER 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 for friends any more than the Queen of England can. You could have plenty of flatterers, toadies, sycophants--anything, in fine, but friends."
"I don't believe it," said Margaret, half angrily--"not a word of it. There _must_ be some honest people in the world who don't consider that money is everything. You know there must be, beautiful!"
The poet laughed. "That," said he, affably, "is poppycock. You are repeating the sort of thing I said to you yesterday. I am honest now. The best of us, Margaret, cannot help being impressed by the power of money. It is the greatest power in the world, and we cannot--cannot possibly--look upon rich people as being quite like us. We must toady to them a bit, Margaret, whether we want to or not. The Eagle intimidates us all."
"I _hate_ him!" Miss Hugonin announced, with vehemence.
Kennaston searched his pockets. After a moment he produced a dollar bill and showed her the Eagle on it.
"There," he said, gravely, "is the original of the Woods Eagle--the Eagle that intimidates us all. Do you remember what Shakespeare--one always harks back to Shakespeare to clinch an argument, because not even our foremost actors have been able to conceal the fact that he was, as somebody in Dickens acutely points out, 'a dayvilish clever fellow'--do you remember. I say, what Shakespeare observes as to this very Eagle?"
Miss Hugonin shook her little head till it glittered in the sunlight like a topaz. She cared no more for Shakespeare than the average woman does, and she was never quite comfortable when he was alluded to.
"He says," Mr. Kennaston quoted, solemnly:
"The Eagle suffers little birds to sing,
And is not careful what they mean thereby,
Knowing that with the shadow of his wing
He can at pleasure still their melody."
"That's nonsense," said Margaret, calmly. "I haven't the _least_ idea what you're talking about, and I don't believe you have either."
He waved the dollar bill with a heroical gesture. "Here," he asserted, "is the Eagle. And by the little birds, I have not a doubt he meant charity and independence and kindliness and truth and the rest of the standard virtues. That is quite as plausible as the interpretation of the average commentator. The presence of money chills these little birds--ah, it is lamentable, no doubt, but it is true."
"I don't believe it," said Margaret--quite as if that settled the question.
But now his hobby, rowelled by opposition, was spurred to loftier flights.
"Ah, the power of these great fortunes America has bred is monstrous," he suddenly cried. "And always they work for evil. If I were ever to write a melodrama, Margaret, I could wish for no more thorough-paced villain than a large fortune." Kennaston paused and laughed grimly. "We cringe to the Eagle!" said he. "Eh, well, why not? The Eagle is very powerful and very cruel. In the South yonder, the Eagle has penned over a million children in his factories, where day by day he drains the youth and health and very life out of their tired bodies; in sweat-shops, men and women are toiling for the Eagle, giving their lives for the pittance that he grudges them; in countless mines and mills, the Eagle is trading human lives for coal and flour; in Wall Street yonder, the Eagle is juggling as he will with life's necessities--thieving from the farmer, thieving from the consumer, thieving from the poor fools who try to play the Eagle's game, and driving them at will to despair and ruin and death: look whither you may, men die that the Eagle may grow fat. So the Eagle thrives, and daily the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer, and the end----" Kennaston paused, staring into vacancy. "Eh, well," said he, with a smile and a snap of his fingers, "the end rests upon the knees of the gods. But there must need be an end some day. And meanwhile, you cannot blame us if we cringe to the Eagle that is master of the world. It is human nature to cringe to its master; and while human nature is not always an admirable thing, it is, I believe, rather widely distributed."
Margaret did not return the smile. Like any sensible woman, she never tolerated opinions that differed from her own.
So she waved his preachment aside. "You're trying to be eloquent," was her observation, "and you've only succeeded in being very silly and tiresome. Go away, beautiful. You make me awfully tired, and I don't care for you in the least. Go and talk to Kathleen. I shall be here--on this very spot," Margaret added, with commendable precision and an unaccountable increase of colour, "if--if any one should happen to ask."
Then Kennaston rose and laughed merrily.
"You are quite delicious," he commented. "It will always be a grief and a puzzle to me that I am not mad for love of you. It is unreasonable of me," he complained, sadly, and shook his head, "but I prefer Kathleen. And I am quite certain that somebody will ask where you are. I shall describe to him the exact spot--"
Mr. Kennaston paused, with a slight air of apology.
"If I were you," he suggested, pleasantly, "I would move a little--just a little--to the left. That will enable you to obtain to a fuller extent the benefit of the sunbeam which is falling--quite by accident, of course--upon your hair. You are perfectly right, Margaret, in selecting that hedge as a background. Its sombre green sets you off to perfection."
He went away chuckling. He felt that Margaret must think him a devil of a fellow.
She didn't, though.
"The _idea_ of his suspecting me of such unconscionable vanity!" she said, properly offended. Then, "Anyhow, a man has no business to know about such things," she continued, with rising indignation. "I believe Felix Kennaston is as good a judge of chiffons as any woman. That's effeminate, I think, and catty and absurd. I don't believe I ever liked him--not really, that is. Now, what would Billy care about sunbeams and backgrounds, I'd like to know! He'd never even notice them. Billy is a _man_. Why, that's just what father said yesterday!" Margaret cried, and afterward laughed happily. "I suppose old people are right sometimes--but, dear, dear, they're terribly unreasonable at others!"
Having thus uttered the ancient, undying plaint of youth, Miss Hugonin moved a matter of two inches to the left, and smiled, and waited contentedly. It was barely possible some one might come that way; and it is always a comfort to know that one is not exactly repulsive in appearance.
Also, there was the spring about her; and, chief of all, there was a queer fluttering in her heart that was yet not unpleasant. In fine, she was unreasonably happy for no reason at all.
I believe the foolish poets call this feeling love and swear it is divine; however, they will say anything for the sake of an ear-tickling jingle. And while it is true that scientists have any number of plausible and interesting explanations for this same feeling, I am sorry to say I have forgotten them.
I am compelled, then, to fall back upon those same unreliable, irresponsible rhymesters, and to insist with them that a maid waiting in the springtide for the man she loves is necessarily happy and very rarely puzzles her head over the scientific reason for it. _