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 thestrangest thing in the world--referring thereby to the sudden mannerin which she had been disinherited.
The poet laughed and assented. Afterward, turning north from the frontcourt, they descended past the shield-bearing griffins--and you maydepend upon it that each shield is adorned with a bas-relief of theEagle--that guard the broad stairway leading to the formal gardensof Selwoode. The gardens stretch northward to the confines of PeterBlagden's estate of Gridlington; and for my part--unless it were thatprimitive garden that Adam lost--I can imagine no goodlier place.
On this particular forenoon, however, neither Miss Hugonin nor FelixKennaston had eyes for its comeliness; silently they braved thegriffins, and in silence they skirted the fish-pond--silver-crinklingin the May morning--and passed through cloistral ilex-shadowed walks,and amphitheatres of green velvet, and terraces ample and mellowin the sunlight, silently. The trees pelted them with blossoms;pedestaled in leafy recesses, Satyrs grinned at them apishly, and thearrows of divers pot-bellied Cupids threatened them, and Fauns pipedfor them ditties of no tone; the birds were about shrill avocationsoverhead, and everywhere the heatless, odourful air was a caress; butfor all this, Miss Hugonin and Mr. Kennaston were silent and veryfidgetty.
Margaret was hatless--and the glory of the eminently sensible springsun 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, mereviolet froth. As she came starry-eyed through the gardens, theimpudent wind trifling with her hair, I protest she might have beensome lady of Oberon's court stolen out of Elfland to bedevil us poormortals, with only a moonbeam for the changeable heart of her, andfor raiment a violet shadow spirited from the under side of some big,fleecy cloud.
They came presently through a trim, yew-hedged walkway to asummer-house covered with vines, into which Margaret peeped anddeclined to enter, on the ground that it was entirely too chillyand gloomy and _exactly_ like a mausoleum; but nearby they found asemi-circular marble bench about which a group of elm-trees made apleasant shadow splashed at just the proper intervals with sunlight.
On this Margaret seated herself; and then pensively moved to the otherend of the bench, because a slanting sunbeam fell there. Since itwas absolutely necessary to blast Mr. Kennaston's dearest hopes,she thoughtfully endeavoured to distract his attention from his ownmiseries--as far as might be possible--by showing him how exactly likean aureole her hair was in the sunlight. Margaret always had a kindheart.
Kennaston stood before her, smiling a little. He was the sort of manto appreciate the manoeuver.
"My lady," he asked, very softly, "haven't you any good news for me onthis wonderful morning?"
"Excellent news," Margaret assented, with a cheerfulness that wasnot utterly free from trepidation. "I've decided not to marry you,beautiful, and I trust you're properly grateful. You see, you're verynice, of course, but I'm going to marry somebody else, and bigamy isa crime, you know; and, anyhow, I'm only a pauper, and you'd never beable to put up with my temper--now, beautiful, I'm quite sure youcouldn't, so there's not a bit of use in arguing it. Some day you'dend by strangling me, which would be horribly disagreeable for me, andthen they'd hang you for it, you know, and that would be equallydisagreeable for you. Fancy, though, what a good advertisement it wouldbe for your poems!"
"'My lady,' he asked, very softly, 'haven't you anygood news for me on this wonderful morning?'"]
She was not looking at him now--oh, no, Margaret was far too busilyemployed getting the will (which she had carried all this time) intoan absurd little silver chain-bag hanging at her waist. She had notime 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 thefolded paper; the affair really required her closest, undividedattention. Besides, she had not the least desire to look at Kennastonjust 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 infinitelygreater composure. The pause that followed Margaret accordinglydevoted to a scrutiny of his shoes and sincere regret that their ownerwas 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'tsaying this because of what has happened in regard to your moneyaffairs? Believe me, my dear, that makes no difference to me. Itis you I love--you, the woman of my heart--and not a certain, anddoubtless 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 toyou, you know, that you haven't any faults I can recognise and feelfamiliar and friendly with."
"My dear," he protested, "I assure you I am not intentionallydisagreeable."
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. "Iknow I'm not worthy of you. I'm tremendously fond of you, beautiful,but--but, you see, I love somebody else," Margaret concluded, withadmirable 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 happinessand pride that must have made the surrounding roses very hopelesslyjealous. A quaint mothering look, sacred, divine, Madonna-like,woke in her great eyes as she thought--remorsefully--ofhow unhappy Billy must be at that very moment and of how big he wasand of his general niceness; and she desired, very heartily, that thisfleshy young man would make his scene and have done with it. Who washe, forsooth, to keep her from Billy? She wished she had never heardof 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 thensat 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 ofaffectation 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 arenot in love with me. Oh, Margaret, Margaret--you don't mind if I callyou that, do you? I shall have to, in any event, because I like you sotremendously now that we are not going to be married--you have no ideawhat a night I spent."
"I consider it most peculiar and unsympathetic of my hair not to haveturned 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, lastnight 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 themoon--that induced me to make love to you. I acted on the impulse ofthe moment; just for an instant, the novelty of doing a perfectlysensible thing--and marrying money is universally conceded to comeunder that head--appealed to me. So I did it. But all the time I wasin love with Kathleen Saumarez. Why, the moment I left you, I began torealise that not even you--and you are quite the most fascinating andgenerally adorable woman I ever knew, Margaret--I began to realise, Isay, that not even you could ever make me forget that fact. And Iwas very properly miserable. It is extremely queer," Mr. Kennastoncontinued, after an interval of meditation, "but falling in loveappears to be the one utterly inexplicable, utterly reasonless thingone ever does in one's life. You can usually think of some more orless plausible palliation for embezzlemen
t, say, or for robbing acathedral or even for committing suicide--but no man can ever explainhow 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 morebeautiful, younger, more clever, and in every way more attractive thanKathleen. 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 havebeen in love with her all my life. We were boy and girl together,Margaret, and--and I give you my word," Kennaston cried, with hisboyish flush, "I worship her! I simply cannot explain the perfectlyunreasonable way in which I worship her!"
He was sincere. He loved Kathleen Saumarez as much as he was capableof loving any one--almost as much as he loved to dilate on his ownpeculiarities and emotions.
Margaret's gaze was intent upon him. "Yet," she marvelled, "you madelove 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 afteryou knew I was poor?"
"I couldn't very well back out," he submitted, and then cockedhis head on one side. "You see," he added, whimsically, "I wassufficiently 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 howdear--oh, how unutterably dear it was of you, Margaret, to declineto be made happy in any such fashion!" And Mr. Kennaston paused tochuckle and to regard her with genuine esteem and affection.
But still her candid eyes weighed him, and transparently found himwanting.
"You are thinking, perhaps, what an unutterable cad I have been?" hesuggested.
"Yes--you are rather by way of being a cad, beautiful. But I can'thelp liking you, somehow. I dare say it's because you're honestwith me. Nobody--nobody," Miss Hugonin lamented, a forlorn littlequiver 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 anyreal friends?" she pleaded, wistfully.
Kennaston had meant a deal to her, you see; he had been the oneman she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glibartlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved merepinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her hearta queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston. Thethought nauseated her.
"My dear," he answered, kindly, "you will have any number of friendsnow that you are poor. It was merely your money that kept you fromhaving any. You see," Mr. Kennaston went on, with somewhat the air ofone climbing upon his favourite hobby, "money is the only thingthat counts nowadays. In America, the rich are necessarily our onlyaristocracy. It is quite natural. One cannot hope for an aristocracyof intellect, if only for the reason that not one person in a thousandhas any; and birth does not count for much. Of course, it is quitetrue that all of our remote ancestors came over with William theConqueror--I have sometimes thought that the number of steeragepassengers his ships would accommodate must have been little short ofmarvellous--but it is equally true that the grandfathers of most ofour leisure class were either deserving or dishonest persons--whoeither started life on a farm, and studied Euclid by the firelight anddid all the other priggish things they thought would look well in abiography, or else met with marked success in embezzlement. So money,after all, is our only standard; and when a woman is as rich as youwere yesterday she cannot hope for friends any more than the Queenof 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 considerthat money is everything. You know there must be, beautiful!"
The poet laughed. "That," said he, affably, "is poppycock. You arerepeating 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 ofmoney. It is the greatest power in the world, and we cannot--cannotpossibly--look upon rich people as being quite like us. We musttoady to them a bit, Margaret, whether we want to or not. The Eagleintimidates us all."
"I _hate_ him!" Miss Hugonin announced, with vehemence.
Kennaston searched his pockets. After a moment he produced a dollarbill and showed her the Eagle on it.
"There," he said, gravely, "is the original of the Woods Eagle--theEagle that intimidates us all. Do you remember what Shakespeare--onealways harks back to Shakespeare to clinch an argument, because noteven our foremost actors have been able to conceal the fact that hewas, as somebody in Dickens acutely points out, 'a dayvilish cleverfellow'--do you remember. I say, what Shakespeare observes as to thisvery Eagle?"
Miss Hugonin shook her little head till it glittered in the sunlightlike a topaz. She cared no more for Shakespeare than the average womandoes, 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_ ideawhat 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 meantcharity and independence and kindliness and truth and the rest of thestandard virtues. That is quite as plausible as the interpretation ofthe average commentator. The presence of money chills these littlebirds--ah, it is lamentable, no doubt, but it is true."
"I don't believe it," said Margaret--quite as if that settled thequestion.
But now his hobby, rowelled by opposition, was spurred to loftierflights.
"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 towrite a melodrama, Margaret, I could wish for no more thorough-pacedvillain than a large fortune." Kennaston paused and laughed grimly."We cringe to the Eagle!" said he. "Eh, well, why not? The Eagle isvery powerful and very cruel. In the South yonder, the Eagle haspenned over a million children in his factories, where day by day hedrains the youth and health and very life out of their tired bodies;in sweat-shops, men and women are toiling for the Eagle, giving theirlives for the pittance that he grudges them; in countless mines andmills, the Eagle is trading human lives for coal and flour; inWall Street yonder, the Eagle is juggling as he will with life'snecessities--thieving from the farmer, thieving from the consumer,thieving from the poor fools who try to play the Eagle's game, anddriving them at will to despair and ruin and death: look whither youmay, men die that the Eagle may grow fat. So the Eagle thrives, anddaily the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer, and the end----"Kennaston paused, staring into vacancy. "Eh, well," said he, with asmile and a snap of his fingers, "the end rests upon the knees ofthe gods. But there must need be an end some day. And meanwhile, youcannot 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 natureis not always an admirable thing, it is, I believe, rather widelydistributed."
Margaret did not return the smile. Like any sensible woman, she nevertolerated opinions that differed from her own.
So she waved his preachment aside. "You're trying to be eloquent," washer observation, "and you've only succeeded in being very silly andtiresome. Go away, beautiful. You make me awfully tired, and I don'tcare for you in the least. Go and talk to Kathleen. I shall behere--on this very spot," Margaret added, with commendable precisionand an unaccountable increase of colour, "if--if any one should happento ask."
Then Kennaston rose and laughed merrily.
"You are quite delicious," he commented. "It will always be agrief and a puzzle to me that I am not mad for love of you. It isunreasonable of me," he complained, sadly, and shook his head, "but Iprefer Kathleen. And I am quite certain that somebod
y will ask whereyou 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 alittle--just a little--to the left. That will enable you to obtain toa fuller extent the benefit of the sunbeam which is falling--quiteby accident, of course--upon your hair. You are perfectly right,Margaret, in selecting that hedge as a background. Its sombre greensets you off to perfection."
He went away chuckling. He felt that Margaret must think him a devilof a fellow.
She didn't, though.
"The _idea_ of his suspecting me of such unconscionable vanity!" shesaid, properly offended. Then, "Anyhow, a man has no business to knowabout such things," she continued, with rising indignation. "I believeFelix Kennaston is as good a judge of chiffons as any woman. That'seffeminate, I think, and catty and absurd. I don't believe I everliked him--not really, that is. Now, what would Billy care aboutsunbeams and backgrounds, I'd like to know! He'd never even noticethem. Billy is a _man_. Why, that's just what father said yesterday!"Margaret cried, and afterward laughed happily. "I suppose old peopleare right sometimes--but, dear, dear, they're terribly unreasonable atothers!"
Having thus uttered the ancient, undying plaint of youth, Miss Hugoninmoved a matter of two inches to the left, and smiled, and waitedcontentedly. It was barely possible some one might come that way; andit is always a comfort to know that one is not exactly repulsive inappearance.
Also, there was the spring about her; and, chief of all, there was aqueer 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 itis divine; however, they will say anything for the sake of anear-tickling jingle. And while it is true that scientists have anynumber of plausible and interesting explanations for this samefeeling, 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 waitingin the springtide for the man she loves is necessarily happy and veryrarely puzzles her head over the scientific reason for it.