with Heaven on a purely business basis; he kept a species of running
account with Providence; and if on occasions he overdrew it somewhat,
he saw no incongruity in evening matters with a cheque for the church
fund.
So that at his death it was said of him that he had, in his day, sent
more men into bankruptcy and more missionaries into Africa than any
other man in the country.
In his sixty-fifth year, he caught Alfred Van Orden short in Lard,
erected a memorial window to his wife and became a country gentleman.
He never set foot in Wall Street again. He builded Selwoode--a
handsome Tudor manor which stands some seven miles from the village of
Fairhaven--where he dwelt in state, by turns affable and domineering
to the neighbouring farmers, and evincing a grave interest in the
condition of their crops. He no longer turned to the financial reports
in the papers; and the pedigree of the Woodses hung in the living-hall
for all men to see, beginning gloriously with Woden, the Scandinavian
god, and attaining a respectable culmination in the names of Frederick
R. Woods and of William, his brother.
It is not to be supposed that he omitted to supply himself with a
coat-of-arms. Frederick R. Woods evinced an almost childlike pride in
his heraldic blazonings.
"The Woods arms," he would inform you, with a relishing gusto, "are
vert, an eagle displayed, barry argent and gules. And the crest is
out of a ducal coronet, or, a demi-eagle proper. We have no motto,
sir--none of your ancient coats have mottoes."
The Woods Eagle he gloried in. The bird was perched in every available
nook at Selwoode; it was carved in the woodwork, was set in the
mosaics, was chased in the tableware, was woven in the napery, was
glazed in the very china. Turn where you would, an eagle or two
confronted you; and Hunston Wyke, who is accounted something of a
wit, swore that Frederick R. Woods at Selwoode reminded him of "a
sore-headed bear who had taken up permanent quarters in an aviary."
There was one, however, who found the bear no very untractable
monster. This was the son of his brother, dead now, who dwelt at
Selwoode as heir presumptive. Frederick R. Woods's wife had died long
ago, leaving him childless. His brother's boy was an orphan; and so,
for a time, he and the grim old man lived together peaceably enough.
Indeed, Billy Woods was in those days as fine a lad as you would wish
to see, with the eyes of an inquisitive cherub and a big tow-head,
which Frederick R. Woods fell into the habit of cuffing heartily, in
order to conceal the fact that he would have burned Selwoode to the
ground rather than allow any one else to injure a hair of it.
In the consummation of time, Billy, having attained the ripe age of
eighteen, announced to his uncle that he intended to become a famous
painter. Frederick R. Woods exhorted him not to be a fool, and packed
him off to college.
Billy Woods returned on his first vacation with a fragmentary mustache
and any quantity of paint-tubes, canvases, palettes, mahl-sticks, and
such-like paraphernalia. Frederick R. Woods passed over the mustache,
and had the painters' trappings burned by the second footman. Billy
promptly purchased another lot. His uncle came upon them one morning,
rubbed his chin meditatively for a moment, and laughed for the first
time, so far as known, in his lifetime; then he tiptoed to his own
apartments, lest Billy--the lazy young rascal was still abed in the
next room--should awaken and discover his knowledge of this act of
flat rebellion.
I dare say the old gentleman was so completely accustomed to having
his own way that this unlooked-for opposition tickled him by its
novelty; or perhaps he recognised in Billy an obstinacy akin to his
own; or perhaps it was merely that he loved the boy. In any event, he
never again alluded to the subject; and it is a fact that when
Billy sent for carpenters to convert an upper room into an atelier,
Frederick R. Woods spent two long and dreary weeks in Boston in order
to remain in ignorance of the entire affair.
Billy scrambled through college, somehow, in the allotted four years.
At the end of that time, he returned to find new inmates installed at
Selwoode.
For the wife of Frederick R. Woods had been before her marriage one of
the beautiful Anstruther sisters, who, as certain New Yorkers still
remember--those grizzled, portly, rosy-gilled fellows who prattle
on provocation of Jenny Lind and Castle Garden, and remember
everything--created a pronounced furor at their début in the days of
crinoline and the Grecian bend; and Margaret Anstruther, as they
will tell you, was married to Thomas Hugonin, then a gallant cavalry
officer in the service of Her Majesty, the Empress of India.
And she must have been the nicer of the two, because everybody who
knew her says that Margaret Hugonin is exactly like her.
So it came about naturally enough, that Billy Woods, now an
Artium
Baccalaureus
_, if you please, and not a little proud of it, found the
Colonel and his daughter, then on a visit to this country, installed
at Selwoode as guests and quasi-relatives. And Billy was twenty-two,
and Margaret was nineteen.
* * * * *
Precisely what happened I am unable to tell you. Billy Woods claims
it is none of my business; and Margaret says that it was a long, long
time ago and she really can't remember.
But I fancy we can all form a very fair notion of what is most likely
to occur when two sensible, normal, healthy young people are thrown
together in this intimate fashion at a country-house where the
remaining company consists of two elderly gentlemen. Billy was forced
to be polite to his uncle's guest; and Margaret couldn't well be
discourteous to her host's nephew, could she? Of course not: so
it befell in the course of time that Frederick R. Woods and the
Colonel--who had quickly become a great favourite, by virtue of his
implicit faith in the Eagle and in Woden and Sir Percival de Wode of
Hastings, and such-like flights of heraldic fancy, and had augmented
his popularity by his really brilliant suggestion of Wynkyn de Worde,
the famous sixteenth-century printer, as a probable collateral
relation of the family--it came to pass, I say, that the two gentlemen
nodded over their port and chuckled, and winked at one another and
agreed that the thing would do.
This was all very well; but they failed to make allowances for the
inevitable quarrel and the subsequent spectacle of the gentleman
contemplating suicide and the lady looking wistfully toward a nunnery.
In this case it arose, I believe, over Teddy Anstruther, who for a
cousin was undeniably very attentive to Margaret; and in the natural
course of events they would have made it up before the week was out
had not Frederick R. Woods selected this very moment to interfere in
the matter.
Ah,
si vieillesse savait
!
The blundering old man summoned Billy into his study and ordered him
to marry Margaret Hugonin, precisely as the Colonel might have ordered
a private to go on sentry-duty. Ten days earlier Billy would have
jumped at the chance; ten days later he would probably have suggested
it himself; but at that exact moment he would have as willingly
contemplated matrimony with Alecto or Medusa or any of the Furies.
Accordingly, he declined. Frederick R. Woods flew into a pyrotechnical
display of temper, and gave him his choice between obeying his
commands and leaving his house forever--the choice, in fact, which he
had been according Billy at very brief intervals ever since the boy
had had the measles, fifteen years before, and had refused to take the
proper medicines.
It was merely his usual manner of expressing a request or a
suggestion. But this time, to his utter horror and amaze, the boy took
him at his word and left Selwoode within the hour.
Billy's life, you see, was irrevocably blighted. It mattered very
little what became of him; personally, he didn't care in the least.
But as for that fair, false, fickle woman--perish the thought! Sooner
a thousand deaths! No, he would go to Paris and become a painter of
worldwide reputation; the money his father had left him would easily
suffice for his simple wants. And some day, the observed of all
observers in some bright hall of gaiety, he would pass her coldly by,
with a cynical smile upon his lips, and she would grow pale and totter
and fall into the arms of the bloated Silenus, for whose title she had
bartered her purely superficial charms.
Yes, upon mature deliberation, that was precisely what Billy decided
to do.
Followed dark days at Selwoode. Frederick R. Woods told Margaret of
what had occurred; and he added the information that, as his wife's
nearest relative, he intended to make her his heir.
Then Margaret did what I would scarcely have expected of Margaret.
She turned upon him like a virago and informed Frederick R. Woods
precisely what she thought of him; she acquainted him with the fact
that he was a sordid, low-minded, grasping beast, and a miser, and
a tyrant, and (I think) a parricide; she notified him that he was
thoroughly unworthy to wipe the dust off his nephew's shoes--an
office toward which, to do him justice, he had never shown any marked
aspirations--and that Billy had acted throughout in a most noble and
sensible manner; and that, personally, she wouldn't marry Billy Woods
if he were the last man on earth, for she had always despised him; and
she added the information that she expected to die shortly, and she
hoped they would both be sorry
then
; and subsequently she clapped
the climax by throwing her arms about his neck and bursting into tears
and telling him he was the dearest old man in the world and that she
was thoroughly ashamed of herself.
So they kissed and made it up. And after a little the Colonel and
Margaret went away from Selwoode, and Frederick R. Woods was left
alone to nourish his anger and indignation, if he could, and to hunger
for his boy, whether he would or not. He was too proud to seek him
out; indeed, he never thought of that; and so he waited alone in his
fine house, sick at heart, impotent, hoping against hope that the boy
would come back. The boy never came.
No, the boy never came, because he was what the old man had made
him--headstrong, and wilful, and obstinate. Billy had been thoroughly
spoiled. The old man had nurtured his pride, had applauded it as a
mark of proper spirit; and now it was this same pride that had robbed
him of the one thing he loved in all the world.
So, at last, the weak point in the armour of this sturdy old Pharisee
was found, and Fate had pierced it gaily. It was retribution, if you
will; and I think that none of his victims in "the Street," none of
the countless widows and orphans that he had made, suffered more
bitterly than he in those last days.
It was almost two years after Billy's departure from Selwoode that his
body-servant, coming to rouse Frederick R. Woods one June morning,
found him dead in his rooms. He had been ailing for some time. It
was his heart, the doctors said; and I think that it was, though not
precisely in the sense which they meant.
The man found him seated before his great carved desk, on which his
head and shoulders had fallen forward; they rested on a sheet of
legal-cap paper half-covered with a calculation in his crabbed old
hand as to the value of certain properties--the calculation which he
never finished; and underneath was a mass of miscellaneous papers,
among them his will, dated the day after Billy left Selwoode, in which
Frederick R. Woods bequeathed his millions unconditionally to Margaret
Hugonin when she should come of age.
Her twenty-first birthday had fallen in the preceding month. So
Margaret was one of the richest women in America; and you may depend
upon it, that if many men had loved her before, they worshipped her
now--or, at least, said they did, and, after all, their protestations
were the only means she had of judging. She might have been a
countess--and it must be owned that the old Colonel, who had an honest
Anglo-Saxon reverence for a title, saw this chance lost wistfully--and
she might have married any number of grammarless gentlemen, personally
unknown to her, whose fervent proposals almost every mail brought in;
and besides these, there were many others, more orthodox in their
wooing, some of whom were genuinely in love with Margaret Hugonin, and
some--I grieve to admit it--who were genuinely in love with her money;
and she would have none of them.
She refused them all with the utmost civility, as I happen to know.
How I learned it is no affair of yours.
For Miss Hugonin had remarkably keen eyes, which she used to
advantage. In the world about her they discovered very little that she
could admire. She was none the happier for her wealth; the piled-up
millions overshadowed her personality; and it was not long before she
knew that most people regarded her simply as the heiress of the Woods
fortune--an unavoidable encumbrance attached to the property, which
divers thrifty-minded gentlemen were willing to put up with. To put up
with!--at the thought, her pride rose in a hot blush, and, it must be
confessed, she sought consolation in the looking-glass.
She was an humble-minded young woman, as the sex goes, and she saw no
great reason there why a man should go mad over Margaret Hugonin. This
decision, I grant you, was preposterous, for there were any number of
reasons. Her final conclusion, however, was for the future to regard
all men as fortune-hunters and to do her hair differently.
She carried out both resolutions. When a gentleman grew pressing in
his attentions, she more than suspected his motives; and when she
eventually declined him it was done with perfect, courtesy, but the
glow of her eyes was at such times accentuated to a marked degree.
Meanwhile, the Eagle brooded undisturbed at Selwoode. Miss Hugonin
would allow nothing to be altered.
"The place doesn't belong to me, attractive," she would tell her
father. "I belong to the place. Yes, I do--I'm exactly like a little
cow thrown in with a little farm when they sell it, and
all
my
little suitors think so, and they are very willing to take me on those