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

unable to contend against them. Do you know," Mr. Kenneston
continued gaily, as he trifled with a bunch of grapes, "I feel
horribly out-of-place among you? Here is Mrs. Saumarez creating an
epidemic of useful and improving knowledge throughout the country, by
means of her charming lectures. Here is Mrs. Haggage, the mainspring,
if I may say so, of any number of educational and philanthropic
alarm clocks which will some day rouse the sleeping public from its
lethargy. And here is my friend Jukesbury, whose eloquent pleas for a
higher life have turned so many workmen from gin and improvidence, and
which in a printed form are disseminated even in such remote regions
as Africa, where I am told they have produced the most satisfactory
results upon the unsophisticated but polygamous monarchs of that
continent. And here, above all, is Miss Hugonin, utilising the vast
power of money--which I am credibly informed is a very good thing to
have, though I cannot pretend to speak from experience--and casting
whole bakeryfuls of bread upon the waters of charity. And here am
I, the idle singer of an empty day--a mere drone in this hive of
philanthropic bees! Dear, dear," said Mr. Kennaston, enviously, "what
a thing it is to be practical!" And he laughed toward Margaret, in his
whimsical way.

Miss Hugonin had been strangely silent; but she returned Mr.
Kennaston's smile, and began to take part in the conversation.

"You're only an ignorant child," she rebuked him, "and a very naughty
child, too, to make fun of us in this fashion."

"Yes," Mr. Kennaston assented, "I am wilfully ignorant. The world
adores ignorance; and where ignorance is kissed it is folly to be
wise. To-morrow I shall read you a chapter from my 'Defense of
Ignorance,' which my confiding publisher is going to bring out in the
autumn."

So the table-talk went on, and now Margaret bore a part therein.

      *       *       *       *       *

However, I do not think we need record it further.

Mr. Woods listened in a sort of a daze. Ad�le Haggage and Hugh Van
Orden were conversing in low tones at one end of the table; the
Colonel was eating his luncheon, silently and with a certain air of
resignation; and so Billy Woods was left alone to attend and marvel.

The ideas they advanced seemed to him, for the most part, sensible.
What puzzled him was the uniform gravity which they accorded
equally--as it appeared to him--to the discussion of the most pompous
platitudes and of the most arrant nonsense. They were always serious;
and the general tone of infallibility, Billy thought, could be
warranted only by a vast fund of inexperience.

But, in the main, they advocated theories he had always
held--excellent theories, he considered. And he was seized with an
unreasonable desire to repudiate every one of them.

For it seemed to him that every one of them was aimed at Margaret's
approval. It did not matter to whom a remark was ostensibly
addressed--always at its conclusion the speaker glanced more or
less openly toward Miss Hugonin. She was the audience to which they
zealously played, thought Billy; and he wondered.

I think I have said that, owing to the smallness of the house-party,
luncheon was served in the breakfast-room. The dining-room at Selwoode
is very rarely used, because Margaret declares its size makes a meal
there equivalent to eating out-of-doors.

And I must confess that the breakfast-room is far cosier. The room, in
the first place, is of reasonable dimensions; it is hung with Flemish
tapestries from designs by Van Eyck representing the Four Seasons, but
the walls and ceiling are panelled in oak, and over the mantel carved
in bas-relief the inevitable Eagle is displayed.

The mantel stood behind Margaret's chair; and over her golden head,
half-protectingly, half-threateningly, with his wings outstretched to
the uttermost, the Eagle brooded as he had once brooded over Frederick
R. Woods. The old man sat contentedly beneath that symbol of what
he had achieved in life. He had started (as the phrase runs) from
nothing; he had made himself a power. To him, the Eagle meant that
crude, incalculable power of wealth he gloried in. And to Billy Woods,
the Eagle meant identically the same thing, and--I am sorry to say--he
began to suspect that the Eagle was really the audience to whom Miss
Hugonin's friends so zealously played.

Perhaps the misanthropy of Mr. Woods was not wholly unconnected with
the fact that Margaret never looked at him. She'd show him!--the
fortune-hunter!

So her eyes never strayed toward him; and her attention never left
him. At the end of luncheon she could have enumerated for you every
morsel he had eaten, every glare he had directed toward Kennaston,
every beseeching look he had turned to her. Of course, he had taken
sherry--dry sherry. Hadn't he told her four years ago--it was the
first day she had ever worn the white organdie dotted with purple
sprigs, and they sat by the lake so late that afternoon that Frederick
R. Woods finally sent for them to come to dinner--hadn't he told her
then that only women and children cared for sweet wines? Of course he
had--the villain!


[Illustration: "Billy Woods"]

Billy, too, had his emotions. To hear that paragon, that queen among
women, descant of work done in the slums and of the mysteries of
sweat-shops; to hear her state off-hand that there were seventeen
hundred and fifty thousand children between the ages of ten and
fifteen years employed in the mines and factories of the United
States; to hear her discourse of foreign missions as glibly as though
she had been born and nurtured in Zambesi Land: all these things
filled him with an odd sense of alienation. He wasn't worthy of her,
and that was a fact. He was only a dumb idiot, and half the words that
were falling thick and fast from philanthropic lips about him might as
well have been hailstones, for all the benefit he was deriving from
them. He couldn't understand half she said.

In consequence, he very cordially detested the people who
could--especially that grimacing ass, Kennaston.

Altogether, neither Mr. Woods nor Miss Hugonin got much comfort from
their luncheon.



VII

After luncheon Billy had a quiet half-hour with the Colonel in the
smoking-room.

Said Billy, between puffs of a cigar:

"Peggy's changed a bit."

The Colonel grunted. Perhaps he dared not trust to words.

"Seems to have made some new friends."

A more vigorous grunt.

"Cultured lot, they seem?" said Mr. Woods. "Anxious to do good in the
world, too--philanthropic set, eh?"

A snort this time.

"Eh?" said Mr. Woods. There was dawning suspicion in his tone.

The Colonel looked about him. "My boy," said he, "you thank your stars
you didn't get that money; and, depend upon it, there never was a
gold-ship yet that wasn't followed."

"Pirates?" Billy Woods suggested, helpfully.

"Pirates are human beings," said Colonel Hugonin, with dignity.
"Sharks, my boy; sharks!"




VIII
That evening, after proper deliberation, "C�lestine," Miss Hugonin
commanded, "get out that little yellow dress with the little red
bandanna handkerchiefs on it; and for heaven's sake, stop pulling
my hair out by the roots, unless you want a raving maniac on your
hands, C�lestine!"

Whereby she had landed me in a quandary. For how, pray, is it possible
for me, a simple-minded male, fittingly to depict for you the clothes
of Margaret?--the innumerable vanities, the quaint devices, the
pleasing conceits with which she delighted to enhance her comeliness?
The thing is beyond me. Let us keep discreetly out of her wardrobe,
you and I.

Otherwise, I should have to prattle of an infinity of mysteries--of
her scarfs, feathers, laces, gloves, girdles, knots, hats, shoes,
fans, and slippers--of her embroideries, rings, pins, pendants,
ribbons, spangles, bracelets, and chains--in fine, there would be no
end to the list of gewgaws that went to make Margaret Hugonin even
more adorable than Nature had fashioned her. For when you come to
think of it, it takes the craft and skill and life-work of a thousand
men to dress one girl properly; and in Margaret's case, I protest that
every one of them, could he have beheld the result of their united
labours, would have so gloried in his own part therein that there
would have been no putting up with any of the lot.

Yet when I think of the tiny shoes she affected--patent-leather ones
mostly, with a seam running straight up the middle (and you may guess
the exact date of our comedy by knowing in what year these shoes were
modish); the string of fat pearls she so often wore about her round,
full throat; the white frock, say, with arabesques of blue all over
it, that Felix Kennaston said reminded him of Ruskin's tombstone; or
that other white-and-blue one--d�collet�, that was--which I swear
seraphic mantua-makers had woven out of mists and the skies of June:
when I remember these things, I repeat, almost am I tempted to become
a boot-maker and a lapidary and a milliner and, in fine, an adept
in all the other arts and trades and sciences that go to make a
well-groomed American girl what she is--the incredible fruit
of grafted centuries, the period after the list of Time's
achievements--just that I might describe Margaret to you properly.

But the thing is beyond me. I leave such considerations, then, to
C�lestine, and resolve for the future rigorously to eschew all such
gauds. Meanwhile, if an untutored masculine description will content
you--

Margaret, I have on reliable feminine authority, was one of the very
few blondes whose complexions can carry off reds and yellows.
This particular gown--I remember it perfectly--was of a dim, dull
yellow--flounciful (if I may coin a word), diaphanous, expansive. I
have not the least notion what fabric composed it; but scattered about
it, in unexpected places, were diamond-shaped red things that I am
credibly informed are called medallions. The general effect of it may
be briefly characterised as grateful to the eye and dangerous to the
heart, and to a rational train of thought quite fatal.

For it was cut low in the neck; and Margaret's neck and shoulders
would have drawn madrigals from a bench of bishops.

And in consequence, Billy Woods ate absolutely no dinner that evening.



IX

It was an hour or two later when the moon, drifting tardily up from
the south, found Miss Hugonin and Mr. Kennaston chatting amicably
together in the court at Selwoode. They were discussing the deplorable
tendencies of the modern drama.

The court at Selwoode lies in the angle of the building, the ground
plan of which is L-shaped. Its two outer sides are formed by covered
cloisters leading to the palm-garden, and by moonlight--the night
bland and sweet with the odour of growing things, vocal with plashing
fountains, spangled with fire-flies that flicker indolently among a
glimmering concourse of nymphs and fauns eternally postured in flight
or in pursuit--by moonlight, I say, the court at Selwoode is perhaps
as satisfactory a spot for a t�te-�-t�te as this transitory world
affords.

Mr. Kennaston was in vein to-night; he scintillated; he was also a
little nervous. This was probably owing to the fact that Margaret,
leaning against the back of the stone bench on which they both sat,
her chin propped by her hand, was gazing at him in that peculiar,
intent fashion of hers which--as I think I have mentioned--caused you
fatuously to believe she had forgotten there were any other trousered
beings extant.

Mr. Kennaston, however, stuck to apt phrases and nice distinctions.
The moon found it edifying, but rather dull.

After a little Mr. Kennaston paused in his boyish, ebullient speech,
and they sat in silence. The lisping of the fountains was very
audible. In the heavens, the moon climbed a little further and
registered a manifestly impossible hour on the sun-dial. It also
brightened.

It was a companionable sort of a moon. It invited talk of a
confidential nature.

"Bless my soul," it was signalling to any number of gentlemen at that
moment, "there's only you and I and the girl here. Speak out, man!
She'll have you now, if she ever will. You'll never have a chance like
this again, I can tell you. Come, now, my dear boy, I'm shining full
in your face, and you've no idea how becoming it is. I'm not like that
garish, blundering sun, who doesn't know any better than to let her
see how red and fidgetty you get when you're excited; I'm an old hand
at such matters. I've presided over these little affairs since Babylon
was a paltry village. I'll never tell. And--and if anything should
happen, I'm always ready to go behind a cloud, you know. So, speak
out!--speak out, man, if you've the heart of a mouse!"

Thus far the conscienceless spring moon.

Mr. Kennaston sighed. The moon took this as a promising sign and
brightened over it perceptibly, and thereby afforded him an excellent
gambit.

"Yes?" said Margaret. "What is it, beautiful?"

That, in privacy, was her fantastic name for him.

The