The Eagle's Shadow by James Branch Cabell (rm book recommendations TXT) 📗

with a paltry thousand
or so a year! You marry her!--why, I dare say she's refused a
hundred better men than you! She'd think you were mad! Why, she'd
think you were after her money! She--oh, she'd only think you a
precious cheeky ass, she would, and she'd be quite right. You are an
ass, Billy Woods! You ought to be locked up in some nice quiet stable,
where your heehawing wouldn't disturb people. You need a keeper, you
do!"

He sat for some ten minutes, aghast. Afterward he rose and threw back
his shoulders and drew a deep breath.

"No, we aren't an ass," he addressed his reflection in the mirror, as
he carefully knotted his tie. "We're only a poor chuckle-headed moth
who's been looking at a star too long. It's a bright star, Billy, but
it isn't for you. So we're going to be sensible now. We're going to
get a telegram to-morrow that will call us away from Selwoode. We
aren't coming back any more, either. We're simply going to continue
painting fifth-rate pictures, and hoping that some day she'll find the
right man and be very, very happy."

Nevertheless, he decided that a blue tie would look better, and was
very particular in arranging it.

At the same moment Margaret stood before her mirror and tidied her
hair for luncheon and assured her image in the glass that she was a
weak-minded fool. She pointed out to herself the undeniable fact that
Billy, having formerly refused to marry her--oh, ignominy!--seemed
pleasant-spoken enough, now that she had become an heiress. His
refusal to accept part of her fortune was a very flimsy device; it
simply meant he hoped to get all of it. Oh, he did, did he!

Margaret powdered her nose viciously.

She saw through him! His honest bearing she very plainly perceived
to be the result of consummate hypocrisy. In his laughter her keen ear
detected a hollow ring; and his courteous manner she found, at bottom,
mere servility. And finally she demonstrated--to her own satisfaction,
at least--that his charm of manner was of exactly the, same sort that
had been possessed by many other eminently distinguished criminals.

How did she do this? My dear sir, you had best inquire of your mother
or your sister or your wife, or any other lady that your fancy
dictates. They know. I am sure I don't.

And after it all--

"Oh, dear, dear!" said Margaret; "I do wish he didn't have such nice
eyes!"



VI

On the way to luncheon Mr. Woods came upon Ad�le Haggage and Hugh Van
Orden, both of whom he knew, very much engrossed in one another, in a
nook under the stairway. To Billy it seemed just now quite proper that
every one should be in love; wasn't it--after all--the most pleasant
condition in the world? So he greeted them with a semi-paternal smile
that caused Ad�le to flush a little.

For she was--let us say, interested--in Mr. Van Orden. That was
tolerably well known. In fact, Margaret--prompted by Mrs. Haggage,
it must be confessed--had invited him to Selwoode for the especial
purpose of entertaining Miss Ad�le Haggage; for he was a good match,
and Mrs. Haggage, as an experienced chaperon, knew the value of
country houses. Very unexpectedly, however, the boy had developed a
disconcerting tendency to fall in love with Margaret, who snubbed him
promptly and unmercifully. He had accordingly fallen back on Ad�le,
and Mrs. Haggage had regained both her trust in Providence and her
temper.

In the breakfast-room, where luncheon was laid out, the Colonel
greeted Mr. Woods with the enthusiasm a sailor shipwrecked on a desert
island might conceivably display toward the boat-crew come to rescue
him. The Colonel liked Billy; and furthermore, the poor Colonel's
position at Selwoode just now was not utterly unlike that of the
suppositious mariner; were I minded to venture into metaphor, I should
picture him as clinging desperately to the rock of an old fogeyism
and surrounded by weltering seas of advanced thought. Colonel Hugonin
himself was not advanced in his ideas. Also, he had forceful opinions
as to the ultimate destination of those who were.

Then Billy was presented to the men of the party--Mr. Felix Kennaston
and Mr. Petheridge Jukesbury. Mrs. Haggage he knew slightly; and
Kathleen Saumarez he had known very well indeed, some six years
previously, before she had ever heard of Miguel Saumarez, and when
Billy was still an undergraduate. She was a widow now, and not
well-to-do; and Mr. Woods's first thought on seeing her was that a man
was a fool to write verses, and that she looked like just the sort of
woman to preserve them.

His second was that he had verged on imbecility when he fancied he
admired that slender, dark-haired type. A woman's hair ought to be an
enormous coronal of sunlight; a woman ought to have very large, candid
eyes of a colour between that of sapphires and that of the spring
heavens, only infinitely more beautiful than either; and all
petticoated persons differing from this description were manifestly
quite unworthy of any serious consideration.

So his eyes turned to Margaret, who had no eyes for him. She had
forgotten his existence, with an utterness that verged on ostentation;
and if it had been any one else Billy would have surmised she was in a
temper. But that angel in a temper!--nonsense! And, oh, what eyes she
had! and what lashes! and what hair!--and altogether, how adorable she
was, and what a wonder the admiring gods hadn't snatched her up to
Olympus long ago!

Thus far Mr. Woods.

But if Miss Hugonin was somewhat taciturn, her counsellors in divers
schemes for benefiting the universe were in opulent vein. Billy heard
them silently.

"I have spent the entire morning by the lake," Mr. Kennaston informed
the party at large, "in company with a mocking-bird who was practising
a new aria. It was a wonderful place; the trees were lisping verses to
themselves, and the sky overhead was like a robin's egg in colour,
and a faint wind was making tucks and ruches and pleats all over
the water, quite as if the breezes had set up in business as
mantua-makers. I fancy they thought they were working on a great sheet
of blue silk, for it was very like that. And every once in a while a
fish would leap and leave a splurge of bubble and foam behind that you
would have sworn was an inserted lace medallion."

Mr. Kennaston, as you are doubtless aware, is the author of "The
King's Quest" and other volumes of verse. He is a full-bodied young
man, with hair of no particular shade; and if his green eyes are a
little aged, his manner is very youthful. His voice in speaking is
wonderfully pleasing, and he has a habit of cocking his head on one
side, in a bird-like fashion.

"Indeed," Mr. Petheridge Jukesbury observed, "it is very true that God
made the country and man made the town. A little more wine, please."

Mr. Jukesbury is a prominent worker in the cause of philanthropy
and temperance. He is ponderous and bland; and for the rest, he is
president of the Society for the Suppression of Nicotine and the
Nude, vice-president of the Anti-Inebriation League, secretary of the
Incorporated Brotherhood of Benevolence, and the bearer of divers
similar honours.

"I am never really happy in the country," Mrs. Saumarez dissented; "it
reminds me so constantly of our rural drama. I am always afraid the
quartette may come on and sing something."

Kathleen Eppes Saumarez, as I hope you do not need to be told, is
the well-known lecturer before women's clubs, and the author of many
sympathetic stories of Nature and animal life of the kind that have
had such a vogue of late. There was always an indefinable air of
pathos about her; as Hunston Wyke put it, one felt, somehow, that her
mother had been of a domineering disposition, and that she took after
her father.

"Ah, dear lady," Mr. Kennaston cried, playfully, "you, like many of
us, have become an alien to Nature in your quest of a mere Earthly
Paradox. Epigrams are all very well, but I fancy there is more
happiness to be derived from a single impulse from a vernal wood than
from a whole problem-play of smart sayings. So few of us are
natural," Mr. Kennaston complained, with a dulcet sigh; "we are too
sophisticated. Our very speech lacks the tang of outdoor life.
Why should we not love Nature--the great mother, who is, I grant you,
the necessity of various useful inventions, in her angry moods, but
who, in her kindly moments--" He paused, with a wry face. "I beg your
pardon," said he, "but I believe I've caught rheumatism lying by that
confounded pond."

Mrs. Saumarez rallied the poet, with a pale smile. "That comes of
communing with Nature," she reminded him; "and it serves you rightly,
for natural communications corrupt good epigrams. I prefer Nature
with wide margins and uncut leaves," she spoke, in her best platform
manner. "Art should be an expurgated edition of Nature, with all
the unpleasant parts left out. And I am sure," Mrs. Saumarez added,
handsomely, and clinching her argument, "that Mr. Kennaston gives us
much better sunsets in his poems than I have ever seen in the west."

He acknowledged this with a bow.

"Not sherry--claret, if you please," said Mr. Jukesbury. "Art should
be an expurgated edition of Nature," he repeated, with a suave
chuckle. "Do you know, I consider that admirably put, Mrs.
Saumarez--admirably, upon my word. Ah, if our latter-day writers would
only take that saying to heart! We do not need to be told of the vice
and corruption prevalent, I am sorry to say, among the very best
people; what we really need is continually to be reminded of the fact
that pure hearts and homes and happy faces are to be found to-day
alike in the palatial residences of the wealthy and in the humbler
homes of those less abundantly favoured by Fortune, and yet dwelling
together in harmony and Christian resignation and--er--comparatively
moderate circumstances."

"Surely," Mrs. Saumarez protested, "art has nothing to do with
morality. Art is a process. You see a thing in a certain way; you make
your reader see it in the same way--or try to. If you succeed, the
result is art. If you fail, it may be the book of the year."

"Enduring immortality and--ah--the patronage of the reading public,"
Mr. Jukesbury placidly insisted, "will be awarded, in the end, only
to those who dwell upon the true, the beautiful, and the--er
--respectable. Art must cheer; it must be optimistic and
edifying and--ah--suitable for young persons; it must have an uplift,
a leaven of righteousness, a--er--a sort of moral baking-powder. It
must utterly eschew the--ah--unpleasant and repugnant details of life.
It is, if I may so express myself, not at home in the m�nage � trois
or--er--the representation of the nude. Yes, another glass of claret,
if you please."

"I quite agree with you," said Mrs. Haggage, in her deep voice. Sarah
Ellen Haggage is, of course, the well-known author of "Child-Labour in
the South," and "The Down-Trodden Afro-American," and other notable
contributions to literature. She is, also, the "Madame President" both
of the Society for the Betterment of Civic Government and Sewerage,
and of the Ladies' League for the Edification of the Impecunious.

"And I am glad to see," Mrs. Haggage presently went on, "that the
literature of the day is so largely beginning to chronicle the sayings
and doings of the labouring classes. The virtues of the humble must be
admitted in spite of their dissolute and unhygienic tendencies. Yes,"
Mrs. Haggage added, meditatively, "our literature is undoubtedly
acquiring a more elevated tone; at last we are shaking off the
scintillant and unwholesome influence of the French."

"Ah, the French!" sighed Mr. Kennaston; "a people who think depravity
the soul of wit! Their art is mere artfulness. They care nothing for
Nature."

"No," Mrs. Haggage assented; "they prefer nastiness. All French
books are immoral. I ran across one the other day that was simply
hideously indecent--unfit for a modest woman to read. And I can assure
you that none of its author's other books are any better. I purchased
the entire set at once and read them carefully, in order to make sure
that I was perfectly justified in warning my working-girls' classes
against them. I wish to misjudge no man--not even a member of a nation
notoriously devoted to absinthe and illicit relations."

She breathed heavily, and looked at Mr. Woods as if, somehow, he
was responsible. Then she gave the name of the book to Petheridge
Jukesbury. He wished to have it placed on the Index Expurgatorius of
the Brotherhood of Benevolence, he said.

"Dear, dear," Felix Kennaston sighed, as Mr. Jukesbury made a note of
it; "you are all so practical. You perceive an evil and proceed at
once, in your common-sense way, to crush it, to stamp it out. Now,
I can merely lament certain unfortunate tendencies of the age; I am
quite