"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!"
image022.jpg
[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.