fault I'm here, lady--at least, it ain't rightly my fault. I just
climbed over the wall to rest a minute--just a minute, lady, in the
shade of these beautiful trees. I ain't a-hurting nobody by that,
lady, I hope."
"Well, you had no business to do it," Miss Hugonin pointed out, "and
you can just climb right back." Then she regarded him more intently,
and her face softened somewhat. "What's the matter with your foot?"
she demanded.
"Brakesman," said Mr. Flinks, briefly. "Threw me off a train. He
struck me cruel hard, he did, and me a poor workingman trying to make
my way to New York, lady, where my poor old mother's dying, lady, and
me out of a job. Ah, it's a hard, hard world, lady--and me her only
son--and he struck me cruel, cruel hard, he did, but I forgive him for
it, lady. Ah, lady, you're so beautiful I know you're got a kind, good
heart, lady. Can't you do something for a poor workingman, lady, with
a poor dying mother--and a poor, sick wife," Mr. Flinks added as a
dolorous afterthought; and drew nearer to her and held out one hand
appealingly.
Petheridge Jukesbury had at divers times pointed out to her the evils
of promiscuous charity, and these dicta Margaret parroted glibly
enough, to do her justice, so long as there was no immediate question
of dispensing alms. But for all that the next whining beggar would
move her tender heart, his glib inventions playing upon it like a
fiddle, and she would give as recklessly as though there were no
such things in the whole wide world as soup-kitchens and organised
charities and common-sense. "Because, you know," she would afterward
salve her conscience, "I
couldn't
be sure he didn't need it, whereas
I was
quite
sure I didn't."
Now she wavered for a moment. "You didn't say you had a wife before,"
she suggested.
"An invalid," sighed Mr. Flinks--"a helpless invalid, lady. And six
small children probably crying for bread at this very moment. Ah,
lady, think what my feelings must be to hear 'em cry in vain--think
what I must suffer to know that I summoned them cherubs out of Heaven
into this here hard, hard world, lady, and now can't do by 'em
properly!" And Cock-eye Flinks brushed away a tear which I, for one,
am inclined to regard as a particularly ambitious flight of his
imagination.
Promptly Margaret opened the bag at her waist and took out her purse.
"Don't!" she pleaded. "Please don't! I--I'm upset already. Take this,
and please--oh,
please
, don't spend it in getting drunk or gambling
or anything horrid," Miss Hugonin implored him. "You all do, and it's
so selfish of you and so discouraging."
Mr. Flinks eyed the purse hungrily. Such a fat purse! thought Cock-eye
Plinks. And there ain't nobody within a mile of here, neither. You are
not to imagine that Mr. Flinks was totally abandoned; his vices were
parochial, restrained for the most part by a lively apprehension of
the law. But now the spell of the Eagle was strong upon him.
"Lady," said Mr. Flinks, twisting in his grimy hand the bill she had
given him--and there, too, the Eagle flaunted in his vigour and
heartened him, "lady, that ain't much for you to give. Can't you do a
little better than that by a poor workingman, lady?"
A very unpleasant-looking person, Mr. Cock-eye Flinks. Oh, a
peculiarly unpleasant-looking person to be a model son and a loving
husband and a tender father. Margaret was filled with a vague alarm.
But she was brave, was Margaret. "No," said she, very decidedly, "I
shan't give you another cent. So you climb right over that wall and go
straight back where you belong."
The methods of Mr. Flinks, I regret to say, were somewhat more crude
than those of Mesdames Haggage and Saumarez and Messieurs Kennaston
and Jukesbury.
"Cheese it!" said Mr. Flinks, and flung away his staff and drew very
near to her. "Gimme that money, do you hear!"
"Don't you dare touch me!" she panted; "ah, don't you
dare
!"
"Aw, hell!" said Mr. Flinks, disgustedly, and his dirty hands were
upon her, and his foul breath reeked in her face.
In her hour of need Margaret's heart spoke.
"Billy!" she wailed; "oh, Billy,
Billy
!"
* * * * *
He came to her--just as he would have scaled Heaven to come to her,
just as he would have come to her in the nethermost pit of Hell if she
had called. Ah, yes, Billy Woods came to her now in her peril, and
I don't think that Mr. Flinks particularly relished the look upon
Billy's face as he ran through the gardens, for Billy was furiously
moved.
Cock-eye Flinks glanced back at the wall behind him. Ten feet high,
and the fellow ain't far off. Cock-eye Flinks caught up his staff, and
as Billy closed upon him, struck him full on the head. Again and again
he struck him. It was a sickening business.
Billy had stopped short. For an instant he stood swaying on his feet,
a puzzled face showing under the trickling blood. Then he flung out
his hands a little, and they flapped loosely at the wrists, like
wet clothes hung in the wind to dry, and Billy seemed to crumple up
suddenly, and slid down upon the grass in an untidy heap.
"Ah-h-h!" said Mr. Flinks. He drew back and stared stupidly at that
sprawling flesh which just now had been a man, and was seized with
uncontrollable shuddering. "Ah-h-h!" said Mr. Flinks, very quietly.
And Margaret went mad. The earth and the sky dissolved in many
floating specks and then went red--red like that heap yonder. The
veneer of civilisation peeled, fell from her like snow from a shaken
garment. The primal beast woke and flicked aside the centuries' work.
She was the Cave-woman who had seen the death of her mate--the brute
who had been robbed of her mate.
"Damn you!
Damn
you!" she screamed, her voice high, flat, quite
unhuman; "ah, God in Heaven damn you!" With inarticulate bestial cries
she fell upon the man who had killed Billy, and her violet fripperies
fluttered, her impotent little hands beat at him, tore at him. She was
fearless, shameless, insane. She only knew that Billy was dead.
With an oath the man flung her from him and turned on his heel. She
fell to coaxing the heap in the grass to tell her that he forgave
her--to open his eyes--to stop bloodying her dress--to come to
luncheon...
A fly settled on Billy's face and came in his zig-zag course to the
red stream trickling from his nostrils, and stopped short. She brushed
the carrion thing away, but it crawled back drunkenly. She touched it
with her finger, and the fly would not move. On a sudden, every nerve
in her body began to shake and jerk like a flag snapping in the wind.
XXVI
Some ten minutes afterward, as the members of the house-party sat
chatting on the terrace before Selwoode, there came among them a mad
woman in violet trappings that were splotched with blood.
"Did you know that Billy was dead?" she queried, smilingly. "Oh, yes,
a man killed Billy just now. Wasn't it too bad? Billy was such a nice
boy, you know. I--I think it's very sad. I think it's the saddest
thing I ever knew of in my life."
Kathleen Saumarez was the first to reach her. But she drew back
quickly.
"No, ah, no!" she said, with a little shudder. "You didn't love Billy.
He loved you, and you didn't love him. Oh, Kathleen, Kathleen, how
could
you help loving Billy? He was such a nice boy. I--I'm rather
sorry he's dead."
Then she stood silent, picking at her dress thoughtfully and still
smiling. Afterward, for the first and only time in history, Miss
Hugonin fainted--fainted with an anxious smile.
Petheridge Jukesbury caught her as she fell, and began to blubber like
a whipped schoolboy as he stood there holding her in his arms.
XXVII
But Billy was not dead. There was still a feeble, jerky fluttering in
his big chest when Colonel Hugonin found him. His heart still moved,
but under the Colonel's hand its stirrings were vague and aimless as
those of a captive butterfly.
The Colonel had seen dead men and dying men before this; and as he
bent over the boy he loved he gave a convulsive sob, and afterward
buried his face in his hands.
Then--of all unlikely persons in the world--it was Petheridge
Jukesbury who rose to meet the occasion.
His suavity and blandness forgotten in the presence of death, he
mounted with confident alacrity to heights of greatness. Masterfully,
he overrode them all. He poured brandy between Billy's teeth. Then he
ordered the ladies off to bed, and recommended to Mr. Kennaston--when
that gentleman spoke of a clergyman--a far more startling destination.
For, "It is far from my intention," said Mr.
Jukesbury, "to appear lacking in respect to the cloth, but--er--just
at present I am inclined to think we are in somewhat greater need of a
mattress and a doctor and--ah--the exercise of a little common-sense.
The gentleman is--er--let us hope, in no immediate danger."
"How dare you suggest such a thing, sir?" thundered Petheridge
Jukesbury. "Didn't you see that poor girl's face? I tell you I'll be
damned if he dies, sir!"
And I fancy the recording angel heard him, and against a list of wordy
cheats registered that oath to his credit.
It was Petheridge Jukesbury, then, who stalked into Mrs. Haggage's
apartments and appropriated her mattress as the first at hand, and
afterward waddled through the gardens bearing it on his fat shoulders,
and still later lifted Billy upon it as gently as a woman could have.
But it was the hatless Colonel on his favourite Black Bess ("Damn your
motor-cars!" the Colonel was wont to say; "I consider my appearance
sufficiently unprepossessing already, sir, without my arriving in
Heaven in fragments and stinking of gasoline!") who in Fairhaven town,
some quarter of an hour afterward, leaped Dr. Jeal's garden fence, and
subsequently bundled the doctor into his gig; and again yet later it
was the Colonel who stood fuming upon the terrace with Dr. Jeal on his
way to Selwoode indeed, but still some four miles from the mansion
toward which he was urging his staid horse at its liveliest gait.
Kennaston tried to soothe him. But the Colonel clamoured to the
heavens. Kennaston he qualified in various ways. And as for Dr. Jeal,
he would hold him responsible--"personally, sir"--for the consequences
of his dawdling in this fashion--"Damme, sir, like a damn' snail with
a wooden leg!"
"I am afraid," said Kennaston, gravely, "that the doctor will be of
very little use when he does arrive."
There was that in his face which made the Colonel pause in his
objurgations.
"Sir," said the Colonel, "what--do--you--mean?" He found articulation
somewhat difficult.
"In your absence," Kennaston answered, "Mr. Jukesbury, who it
appears knows something of medicine, has subjected Mr. Woods to an
examination. It--it would be unkind to deceive you----"
"Come to the point, sir," the Colonel interrupted him. "What--do
you--mean?"
"I mean," said Felix Kennaston, sadly, "that--he is afraid--Mr. Woods
will never recover consciousness."
Colonel Hugonin stared at him. The skin of his flabby, wrinkled old
throat was working convulsively.
Then, "You're wrong, sir," the Colonel said. "Billy
shan't
die. Damn
Jukesbury! Damn all doctors, too, sir! I put my trust in my God, sir,
and not in a box of damn' sugar-pills, sir. And I tell you, sir,
thatboy is not going to die
."
Afterward he turned and went into Selwoode defiantly.
XXVIII
In the living-hall the Colonel found Margaret, white as paper, with
purple lips that timidly smiled at him.
"Why ain't you in bed?" the old gentleman demanded, with as great an
affectation of sternness as he could muster. To say the truth, it was
not much; for Colonel Hugonin, for all his blustering optimism, was
sadly shaken now.
"Attractive," said Margaret, "I was, but I couldn't stay there. My--my
brain won't stop working, you see," she complained, wearily. "There's
a thin little whisper in the back of it that keeps telling me about
Billy, and what a liar he is, and what nice eyes he has, and how
poor Billy is dead. It keeps telling me that, over and over again,
attractive. It's such a tiresome, silly little whisper. But he is
dead, isn't he? Didn't Mr. Kennaston tell me just now that he was
dead?--or was it the whisper, attractive?"
The Colonel coughed. "Kennaston--er--Kennaston's a fool," he declared,
helplessly. "Always said he was a fool. We'll have Jeal in presently."
"No--I remember now--Mr. Kennaston said Billy would die very soon. You
don't like people to disagree with you, do you, attractive? Of course,
he will die, for the man hit him very,
very
hard. I'm sorry Billy is
going to die, though, even if he is such a liar!"
"Don't!" said the Colonel, hoarsely; "don't, daughter! I don't know
what there is between you and Billy, but you're wrong. Oh, you're very
hopelessly wrong! Billy's the finest boy I know."