The Eagle's Shadow Part 15

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 pa.s.sengers his ships would accommodate must have been little short of marvellous--but it is equally true that the grandfathers of most of our leisure cla.s.s 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 poppyc.o.c.k. 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 d.i.c.kens 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 a.s.serted, "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 G.o.ds. 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.

XXI

But ten minutes later she saw Mr. Woods in the distance striding across the sunlit terraces, and was seized with a conviction that their interview was likely to prove a stormy one. There was an ominous stiffness in his gait.

"Oh, dear, dear!" Miss Hugonin wailed; "he's in a temper now, and he'll probably be just as disagreeable as it's possible for any one to be. I do wish men weren't so unreasonable! He looks exactly like a big, blue-eyed thunder-cloud just now--just now, when I'm sure he has every cause in the _world_ to be very much pleased--after all I've done for him. He makes me awfully tired. I think he's _very ungrateful_. I--I think I'm rather afraid."

In fact, she was. Now that the meeting she had antic.i.p.ated these twelve hours past was actually at hand, there woke in her breast an unreasoning panic. Miss Hugonin considered, and caught up her skirts, and whisked into the summer-house, and there sat down in the darkest corner and devoutly wished Mr. Woods in Crim Tartary, or Jericho, or, in a word, any region other than the gardens of Selwoode.

Billy came presently to the opening in the hedge and stared at the deserted bench. He was undeniably in a temper. But, then, how becoming it was! thought someone.

"Miss Hugonin!" he said, coldly.

Evidently (thought someone) he intends to be just as nasty as possible.

"Peggy!" said Mr. Woods, after a little.

Perhaps (thought someone) he won't be _very_ nasty.

"Dear Peggy!" said Mr. Woods, in his most conciliatory tone.

Someone rearranged her hair complacently.

But there was no answer, save the irresponsible chattering of the birds, and with a sigh Billy turned upon his heel.

Then, by the oddest chance in the world, Margaret coughed.

I dare say it was damp in the summer-house; or perhaps it was caused by some pa.s.sing bronchial irritation; or perhaps, incredible as it may seem, she coughed to show him where she was. But I scarcely think so, because Margaret insisted afterward--very positively, too--that she didn't cough at all.

XXII

"Well!" Mr. Woods observed, lengthening the word somewhat.

In the intimate half-light of the summer-house, he loomed prodigiously big. He was gazing downward in careful consideration of three fat tortoise-sh.e.l.l pins and a surprising quant.i.ty of gold hair, which was practically all that he could see of Miss Hugonin's person; for that young lady had suddenly become a limp ma.s.s of abashed violet ruffles, and had discovered new and irresistible attractions in the mosaics about her feet.