The Eagles Shadow | Page 8

he waited alone in his fine
house, sick at heart, impotent, hoping against hope that the boy would
come back. The boy never came.
No, the boy never came, because he was what the old man had made
him--headstrong, and wilful, and obstinate. Billy had been thoroughly

spoiled. The old man had nurtured his pride, had applauded it as a mark
of proper spirit; and now it was this same pride that had robbed him of
the one thing he loved in all the world.
So, at last, the weak point in the armour of this sturdy old Pharisee was
found, and Fate had pierced it gaily. It was retribution, if you will; and
I think that none of his victims in "the Street," none of the countless
widows and orphans that he had made, suffered more bitterly than he in
those last days.
It was almost two years after Billy's departure from Selwoode that his
body-servant, coming to rouse Frederick R. Woods one June morning,
found him dead in his rooms. He had been ailing for some time. It was
his heart, the doctors said; and I think that it was, though not precisely
in the sense which they meant.
The man found him seated before his great carved desk, on which his
head and shoulders had fallen forward; they rested on a sheet of
legal-cap paper half-covered with a calculation in his crabbed old hand
as to the value of certain properties--the calculation which he never
finished; and underneath was a mass of miscellaneous papers, among
them his will, dated the day after Billy left Selwoode, in which
Frederick R. Woods bequeathed his millions unconditionally to
Margaret Hugonin when she should come of age.
Her twenty-first birthday had fallen in the preceding month. So
Margaret was one of the richest women in America; and you may
depend upon it, that if many men had loved her before, they
worshipped her now--or, at least, said they did, and, after all, their
protestations were the only means she had of judging. She might have
been a countess--and it must be owned that the old Colonel, who had an
honest Anglo-Saxon reverence for a title, saw this chance lost
wistfully--and she might have married any number of grammarless
gentlemen, personally unknown to her, whose fervent proposals almost
every mail brought in; and besides these, there were many others, more
orthodox in their wooing, some of whom were genuinely in love with
Margaret Hugonin, and some--I grieve to admit it--who were genuinely
in love with her money; and she would have none of them.

She refused them all with the utmost civility, as I happen to know. How
I learned it is no affair of yours.
For Miss Hugonin had remarkably keen eyes, which she used to
advantage. In the world about her they discovered very little that she
could admire. She was none the happier for her wealth; the piled-up
millions overshadowed her personality; and it was not long before she
knew that most people regarded her simply as the heiress of the Woods
fortune--an unavoidable encumbrance attached to the property, which
divers thrifty-minded gentlemen were willing to put up with. To put up
with!--at the thought, her pride rose in a hot blush, and, it must be
confessed, she sought consolation in the looking-glass.
She was an humble-minded young woman, as the sex goes, and she
saw no great reason there why a man should go mad over Margaret
Hugonin. This decision, I grant you, was preposterous, for there were
any number of reasons. Her final conclusion, however, was for the
future to regard all men as fortune-hunters and to do her hair
differently.
She carried out both resolutions. When a gentleman grew pressing in
his attentions, she more than suspected his motives; and when she
eventually declined him it was done with perfect, courtesy, but the
glow of her eyes was at such times accentuated to a marked degree.
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. But they shan't,
attractive. I hate every single solitary man in the whole wide world but
you, beautiful, and I particularly hate that horrid old Eagle; but we'll
keep him because he's a constant reminder to me that Solomon or
Moses, or whoever it was that said all men were liars, was a person of
very great intelligence."

So that I think we may fairly say the money did her no good.
If it