In Selwoode I can fancy how the Eagle screamed his
triumph.
But Billy’s face was ashen.
“Before God!” he said, between his teeth,
“loving you as I do, I wouldn’t marry
you now for all the wealth in the world! The money
has ruined you—ruined you, Peggy.”
For a little she stared at him. By and bye, “I
dare say it has,” she said, in a strangely sober
tone. “I’ve been scolding like a fishwife.
I beg your pardon, Mr. Woods—not for what
I’ve said, because I meant every word
of it, but I beg your pardon for saying it. Don’t
come with me, please.”
Blindly she turned from him. Her shoulders had
the droop of an old woman’s. Margaret was
wearied now, weary with the weariness of death.
For a while Mr. Woods stared after the tired little
figure that trudged straight onward in the sunlight,
stumbling as she went. Then a pleached walk swallowed
her, and Mr. Woods groaned.
“Oh, Peggy, Peggy!” he said, in bottomless
compassion; “oh, my poor little Peggy!
How changed you are!”
Afterward Mr. Woods sank down upon the bench and buried
his face in his hands. He sat there for a long
time. I don’t believe he thought of anything
very clearly. His mind was a turgid chaos of misery;
and about him the birds shrilled and quavered and
carolled till the air was vibrant with their trilling.
One might have thought they choired in honour of the
Eagle’s triumph, in mockery of poor Billy.
Then Mr. Woods raised his head with a queer, alert
look. Surely he had heard a voice—the
dearest of all voices.
“Billy!” it wailed; “oh, Billy,
Billy!”
For at the height of this particularly mischancy posture
of affairs the meddlesome Fates had elected to dispatch
Cock-eye Flinks to serve as our deus ex machina.
And just as in the comedy the police turn up in the
nick of time to fetch Tartuffe to prison, or in the
tragedy Friar John manages to be detained on his journey
to Mantua and thus bring about that lamentable business
in the tomb of the Capulets, so Mr. Flinks now happens
inopportunely to arrive upon our lesser stage.
Faithfully to narrate how Cock-eye Flinks chanced
to be at Selwoode were a task of magnitude. That
gentleman travelled very quietly; and for the most
part, he journeyed incognito under a variety of aliases
suggested partly by a fertile imagination and in part
by prudential motives. For his notions of proprietary
rights were deplorably vague, and his acquaintance
with the police, in consequence, extensive. And
finally, that he was now at Selwoode was not in the
least his fault, but all the doing of an N. & O. brakesman,
who had in uncultured argument, reinforced by a coupling-pin,
persuaded Mr. Flinks to disembark from the northern
freight on the night previous.
Mr. Flinks, then, sat leaning against a tree in the
gardens of Selwoode, some thirty feet from the wall
that stands between Selwoode and Gridlington, and
nursed his pride and foot, both injured in that high
debate of last evening, and with a jackknife rounded
off the top of a substantial staff designed to alleviate
his present lameness. Meanwhile, he tempered
his solitude with music, whistling melodiously the
air of a song that pertained to the sacredness of home
and of a white-haired mother.
