“Ho, yes, sir,” said Wilkins; “Miss
’Enderson—Mrs. ’Aggage’s
maid, that his, sir—was reading haloud
hout hof ‘Hunder Two Flags’ honly last
hevening, sir.”
“H’m—Wilkins—if
you can run across one of them in the servants’
quarters—you might leave it—by
my bed—to-night.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And—h’m, Wilkins—you
can put it under that book of Herbert Spencer’s
my daughter gave me yesterday. Under it, Wilkins—and,
h’m, Wilkins—you needn’t mention
it to anybody. Ouida ain’t cultured, Wilkins,
but she’s damn’ good reading. 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.
And to do this I must commence with the nature of
the man who founded Selwoode.
It was when the nineteenth century was still a hearty
octogenarian that Frederick R. Woods caused Selwoode
to be builded. I give you the name by which he
was known on “the Street.” A mythology
has grown about the name since, and strange legends
of its owner are still narrated where brokers congregate.
But with the lambs he sheared, and the bulls he dragged
to earth, and the bears he gored to financial death,
we have nothing to do; suffice it, that he performed
these operations with almost uniform success and in
an unimpeachably respectable manner.
And if, in his time, he added materially to the lists
of inmates in various asylums and almshouses, it must
be acknowledged that he bore his victims no malice,
and that on every Sunday morning he confessed himself
to be a miserable sinner, in a voice that was perfectly
audible three pews off. At bottom, I think he
considered his relations with Heaven on a purely business
basis; he kept a species of running account with Providence;
and if on occasions he overdrew it somewhat, he saw
no incongruity in evening matters with a cheque for
the church fund.
So that at his death it was said of him that he had,
in his day, sent more men into bankruptcy and more
missionaries into Africa than any other man in the
country.
In his sixty-fifth year, he caught Alfred Van Orden
short in Lard, erected a memorial window to his wife
and became a country gentleman. He never set
foot in Wall Street again. He builded Selwoode—a
handsome Tudor manor which stands some seven miles
from the village of Fairhaven—where he
dwelt in state, by turns affable and domineering to
the neighbouring farmers, and evincing a grave interest
in the condition of their crops. He no longer
turned to the financial reports in the papers; and
the pedigree of the Woodses hung in the living-hall
for all men to see, beginning gloriously with Woden,
the Scandinavian god, and attaining a respectable
culmination in the names of Frederick R. Woods and
of William, his brother.
