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That very month she had reached twenty-three, the age of omniscience, when the fallacies and general obtuseness of older people become dishearteningly apparent. "It's nonsense," pursued the old gentleman, "utter, bedlamite nonsense, filling Selwoode up with writing people! Never heard of such a thing.
I suppose that's why she ain't cultured, Wilkins." And now let us go back a little. In a word, let us utilise the next twenty minutes during which Miss Hugonin drives to the neighbouring railway station, in, if you press me, not the most pleasant state of mind conceivable by explaining a thought more fully the posture of affairs at Selwoode on the May morning that starts our story.
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, that boy is not going to die." Afterward he turned and went into Selwoode defiantly.
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 terms, too.
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 Adèle Haggage; for he was a good match, and Mrs. Haggage, as an experienced chaperon, knew the value of country houses.
So Felix Kennaston had his hour. Now Margaret has gone into Selwoode, flame-faced and quite unconscious that she is humming under her breath the words of a certain inane old song: "Oh, she sat for me a chair; She has ringlets in her hair; She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother" Only she sang it "father." And afterward, she suddenly frowned and stamped her foot, did Margaret.
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!
But I doubt if even the insolent sweet wit of Rosalind could have devised a fitting simile for Time's gait at Selwoode those five days that Billy lay abed.
Ah, what a cur you are! Well, some day perhaps I'll buy you just as I would any other cur. Wouldn't you be glad if I did, Billy? Beg for it, Billy! Beg, sir! Beg!" And Margaret flung back her head again, and laughed shrilly, and held up her hand before him as one holds a lump of sugar before a pug-dog. In Selwoode I can fancy how the Eagle screamed his triumph. But Billy's face was ashen.
And speaking for my own sex, I defy any honest fellow to lay his hand upon his waistcoat and swear that it doesn't give him a distinct thrill of pleasure to be seen in public with a millionaire. Daily we truckle in the Eagle's shadow the shadow that lay so heavily across Selwoode.