James Cabell - The Eagle's Shadow

"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!"

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.