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Title: The Street Called Straight

Author: Basil King

Illustrator: Orson Lowell

Release date: December 20, 2004 [eBook #14394]
                Most recently updated: December 18, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Rick Niles, Karina Aleksandrova and the PG Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT ***




Produced by Rick Niles, Karina Aleksandrova and the PG Online
Distributed Proofreading Team






THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT

A NOVEL

BY

BASIL KING

AUTHOR OF
THE INNER SHRINE, THE WILD OLIVE, ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
ORSON LOWELL

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers

1911, 1912.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED MAY, 1912

     "_By the Street Called Straight we come to the House called
     Beautiful_"

     --New England Saying




THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT





I


As a matter of fact, Davenant was under no illusions concerning the
quality of the welcome his hostess was according him, though he found a
certain pleasure in being once more in her company. It was not a keen
pleasure, but neither was it an embarrassing one; it was exactly what he
supposed it would be in case they ever met again--a blending on his part
of curiosity, admiration, and reminiscent suffering out of which time
and experience had taken the sting. He retained the memory of a minute
of intense astonishment once upon a time, followed by some weeks, some
months perhaps, of angry humiliation; but the years between twenty-four
and thirty-three are long and varied, generating in healthy natures
plenty of saving common sense. Work, travel, and a widened knowledge of
men and manners had so ripened Davenant's mind that he was able to see
his proposal now as Miss Guion must have seen it then, as something so
incongruous and absurd as not only to need no consideration, but to call
for no reply. Nevertheless, it was the refusal on her part of a reply,
of the mere laconic No which was all that, in his heart of hearts, he
had ever expected, that rankled in him longest; but even that
mortification had passed, as far as he knew, into the limbo of extinct
regrets. For her present superb air of having no recollection of his
blunder he had nothing but commendation. It was as becoming to the
spirited grace of its wearer as a royal mantle to a queen. Carrying it
as she did, with an easy, preoccupied affability that enabled her to
look round him and over him and through him, to greet him and converse
with him, without seeming positively to take in the fact of his
existence, he was permitted to suppose the incident of their previous
acquaintance, once so vital to himself, to have been forgotten. If this
were so, it would be nothing very strange, since a woman of
twenty-seven, who has had much social experience, may be permitted to
lose sight of the more negligible of the conquests she has made as a
girl of eighteen. She had asked him to dinner, and placed him honorably
at her right; but words could not have made it plainer than it was that
he was but an accident to the occasion.

He was there, in short, because he was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Temple.
After a two years' absence from New England he had arrived in Waverton
that day, "Oh, bother! bring him along," had been the formula in which
Miss Guion had conveyed his invitation, the dinner being but an
informal, neighborly affair. Two or three wedding gifts having arrived
from various quarters of the world, it was natural that Miss Guion
should want to show them confidentially to her dear friend and distant
relative, Drusilla Fane. Mrs. Fane had every right to this privileged
inspection, since she had not only timed her yearly visit to her
parents, Mr. and Mrs. Temple, so that it should synchronize with the
wedding, but had introduced Olivia to Colonel Ashley, in the first
place. Indeed, there had been a rumor at Southsea, right up to the time
of Miss Guion's visit to the pretty little house on the Marine Parade,
that the colonel's calls and attentions there had been not unconnected
with Mrs. Fane herself; but rumor in British naval and military stations
is notoriously overactive, especially in matters of the heart. Certain
it is, however, that when the fashionable London papers announced that a
marriage had been arranged, and would shortly take place, between
Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, of the Sussex Rangers, and of Heneage
Place, Belvoir, Leicestershire, and Olivia Margaret, only child of Henry
Guion, Esquire, of Tory Hill, Waverton, near Boston, Massachusetts,
U.S.A., no one offered warmer congratulations than the lady in whose
house the interesting pair had met. There were people who ascribed this
attitude to the fact that, being constitutionally "game," she refused to
betray her disappointment. She had been "awfully game," they said, when
poor Gerald Fane, also of the Sussex Rangers, was cut off with enteric
at Peshawur. But the general opinion was to the effect that, not wanting
Rupert Ashley (for some obscure, feminine reason) for herself, she had
magnanimously bestowed him elsewhere. Around tea-tables, and at church
parade, it was said "Americans do that," with some comment on the
methods of the transfer.

On every ground, then, Drusilla was entitled to this first look at the
presents, some of which had come from Ashley's brother officers, who
were consequently brother officers of the late Captain Fane; so that
when she telephoned saying she was afraid that they, her parents and
herself, couldn't come to dinner that evening, because a former ward of
her father's--Olivia must remember Peter Davenant!--was arriving to stay
with them for a week or two, Miss Guion had answered, "Oh, bother! bring
him along," and the matter was arranged. It was doubtful, however, that
she knew him in advance to be the Peter Davenant who nine years earlier
had had the presumption to fall in love with her; it was still more
doubtful, after she had actually shaken hands with him and called him by
name, whether she paid him the tribute of any kind of recollection. The
fact that she had seated him at her right, in the place that would
naturally be accorded to Rodney Temple, the scholarly director of the
Department of Ceramics in the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts, made it look
as if she considered Davenant a total stranger. In the few
conventionally gracious words she addressed to him, her manner was that
of the hostess who receives a good many people in the course of a year
toward the chance guest she had never seen before and expects never to
see again.

"Twice round the world since you were last in Boston? How interesting!"
Then, as if she had said enough for courtesy, she continued across the
lights and flowers to Mrs. Fane: "Drusilla, did you know Colonel Ashley
had declined that post at Gibraltar? I'm so glad. I should hate the
Gib."

"The Gib wouldn't hate you," Mrs. Fane assured her. "You'd have a
heavenly time there. Rupert Ashley is deep in the graces of old
Bannockburn, who's in command. He's not a bad old sort, old Ban isn't,
though he's a bit of a martinet. Lady Ban is awful--a bounder in
petticoats. She looks like that."

Drusilla pulled down the corners of a large, mobile mouth, so as to
simulate Lady Bannockburn's expression, in a way that drew a laugh from
every one at the table but the host. Henry Guion remained serious, not
from natural gravity, but from inattention. He was obviously not in a
mood for joking, nor apparently for eating, since he had scarcely tasted
his soup and was now only playing with the fish. As this corroborated
what Mrs. Temple had more than once asserted to her husband during the
past few weeks, that "Henry Guion had something on his mind," she
endeavored to exchange a glance with him, but he was too frankly
enjoying the exercise of his daughter's mimetic gift to be otherwise
observant.

"And what does Colonel Ashley look like, Drucie?" he asked, glancing
slyly at Miss Guion.

"Like that," Mrs. Fane said, instantly. Straightening the corners of
her mouth and squaring her shoulders, she fixed her eyes into a stare of
severity, and stroked horizontally an imaginary mustache, keeping the
play up till her lips quivered.

"It is like him," Miss Guion laughed.

"Is he as stiff as all that?" the professor inquired.

"Not stiff," Miss Guion explained, "only dignified."

"Dignified!" Drusilla cried. "I should think so. He's just like Olivia
herself. It's perfectly absurd that those two should marry. Apart,
they're a pair of splendid specimens; united, they'll be too much of a
good thing. They're both so well supplied with the same set of virtues
that when they look at each other it'll be like seeing their own faces
in a convex mirror. It'll be simply awful."

Her voice had the luscious English intonation, in spite of its being
pitched a little too high. In speaking she displayed the superior,
initiated manner apt to belong to women who bring the flavor of England
into colonial and Indian garrison towns--a manner Drusilla had acquired
notably well, considering that not ten years previous her life had been
bounded by American college class-days. Something of this latter fact
persisted, notwithstanding her English articulation and style of doing
her hair. Her marriage had been the accident of a winter spent with her
mother in Bermuda, at a time when the Sussex Rangers were stationed
there. Her engagement to Captain Gerald Fane--son of the Very Reverend
the Dean of Silchester--was the result of a series of dances given
chiefly in the Hamilton hotels. Marriage brought the girl born and bred
in a New England college town into a kind of life for which she had had
no preparation; but she adapted herself as readily as she would have
done had she married a Russian prince or a Spanish grandee. In the
effort she made there was a mingling of the matter-of-fact and the _tour
de force_. Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has
the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of
jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider.
Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being
impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. "With my
temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford to wait." Following her
husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in
passing all the tests of the troop-ship and the married quarters when he
died. For a while her parents hoped she would make her widowed home in
Boston; but her heart had been given irrevocably to the British army--to
its distinguished correctness, to its sober glories, its world-wide
roving, and its picturesque personal associations. Though she had seen
little of England, except for occasional visits on leave, she had become
English in tastes and at heart. For a year after Gerald's death she
lived with his family at Silchester, in preference to going to her own.
After that she settled in the small house at Southsea, where from time
to time she had her girlhood's companion, Olivia Guion, as a guest.

"Perhaps that'll do us good," Miss Guion ventured, in reply to
Drusilla's observations at her expense. "To see ourselves as others see
us must be much like looking at one's face in a spoon."

"That doesn't do us any good," Rodney Temple corrected, "because we
always blame the spoon."

"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little,
apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice
with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her
pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her
physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other
with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A woman
can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she
has a good one. Don't you love that expression?--'broken lights'? 'We
are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from
Madame de Melcourt."

"I don't expect any now," Olivia explained. "If Aunt Vic had meant to
write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past
forgiveness."

She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock
penitence.

"Dear, dear!" Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. "Just because you
wouldn't marry a Frenchman!"

"And a little because I'm _going_ to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic
all Englishmen are grocers."

"Horrid old thing!" Drusilla said, indignantly.

"It's because she doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's
one of the things I never can understand--how people can generalize
about a whole nation because they happen to dislike one or two
individuals. As a matter of fact, Aunt Vic has become so absorbed in her
little circle of old French royalist noblesse that she can't see
anything to admire outside the rue de l'Université and château life in
Normandy. She does admit that there's an element of homespun virtue in
the old families of Boston and Waverton; but that's only because she
belongs to them herself."

"The capacity of the American woman for being domesticated in an alien
environment," observed Rodney Temple, "is only equaled by the dog's."

"We're nomadic, father," Drusilla asserted, "and migratory. We've always
been so. It's because we're Saxons and Angles and Celts and Normans,
and--"

"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we," Mrs. Temple quoted, gently.

"They've always been fidgeting about the world, from one country to
another," Drusilla continued, "and we've inherited the taste. If we
hadn't, our ancestors would never have crossed the Atlantic, in the
first place. And now that we've got here, and can't go any farther in
this direction, we're on the jump to get back again. That's all there is
to it. It's just in the blood. Isn't it, Peter? Isn't it, Cousin Henry?"

Drusilla had a way of appealing to whatever men were present, as though
her statements lacked something till they had received masculine
corroboration.

"All the same, I wish you could have managed the thing without giving
offence to Aunt Vic."

The words were Henry Guion's first since sitting down to table.

"I couldn't help it, papa. I didn't _give_ Aunt Vic offence; she took
it."

"She's always been so fond of you--"

"I'm fond of _her_. She's an old darling. And yet I couldn't let her
marry me off to a Frenchman, in the French way, when I'd made up my mind
to--to do something else. Could I, Cousin Cherry?"

Mrs. Temple plumed herself, pleased at being appealed to. "I don't see
how you could, dear. But I suppose your dear aunt--great-aunt, that
is--has become so foreign that she's forgotten our simple ways. So long
as you follow your heart, dear--"

"I've done that, Cousin Cherry."

The tone drew Davenant's eyes to her again, not in scrutiny, but for the
pleasure it gave him to see her delicate features suffused with a glow
of unexpected softness. It was unexpected, because her bearing had
always conveyed to him, even in the days when he was in love with her,
an impression of very refined, very subtle haughtiness. It seemed to
make her say, like Marie Antoinette to Madame Vigée-Lebrun: "They would
call me arrogant if I were not a queen." The assumption of privilege and
prerogative might be only the inborn consciousness of distinction, but
he fancied it might be more effective for being tempered. Not that it
was overdone. It was not done at all. If the inner impulse working
outward poised a neat, classic head too loftily, or shot from gray eyes,
limpid and lovely in themselves, a regard that was occasionally too
imperious, Olivia Guion was probably unaware of these effects. With
beauty by inheritance, refinement by association, and taste and "finish"
by instinct, it was possible for her to engage with life relatively free
from the cumbrous impedimenta of self-consciousness. It was because
Davenant was able to allow for this that his judgment on her pride of
manner, exquisite though it was, had never been more severe; none the
less, it threw a new light on his otherwise slight knowledge of her
character to note the faint blush, the touch of gentleness, with which
she hinted her love for her future husband. He had scarcely believed her
capable of this kind of condescension.

He called it condescension because he saw, or thought he saw, in her
approaching marriage, not so much the capture of her heart as the
fulfilment of her ambitions. He admitted that, in her case, there was a
degree to which the latter would imply the former, since she was the
sort of woman who would give her love in the direction in which her
nature found its fitting outlet. He judged something from what Drusilla
Fane had said, as they were driving toward Tory Hill that evening.

"Olivia simply _must_ marry a man who'll give her something to do
besides sitting round and looking handsome. With Rupert Ashley she'll
have the duties of a public, or semi-public, position. He'll keep her
busy, if it's only opening bazars and presenting prizes at Bisley. The
American men who've tried to marry her have wanted to be her servants,
when all the while she's been waiting for a master."

Davenant understood that, now that it was pointed out to him, though the
thought would not have come to him spontaneously. She was the strong
woman who would yield only to a stronger man. Colonel Ashley might not
be stronger than she in intellect or character, but he had done some
large things on a large field, and was counted an active force in a
country of forceful activities. There might be a question as to whether
he would prove to be her master, but he would certainly never think of
being her slave.

"What are _you_ going to do, Henry, when the gallant stranger carries
off Olivia, a fortnight hence?"

Though she asked the question with the good intention of drawing her
host into the conversation, Mrs. Temple made it a point to notice the
effort with which he rallied himself to meet her words.

"What am I going to do?" he repeated, absently. "Oh, my future will
depend very much on--Hobson's choice."

"That's true," Miss Guion agreed, hurriedly, as though to emphasize a
point. "It's all the choice I've left to him. I've arranged everything
for papa--beautifully. He's to take in a partner perhaps two partners.
You know," she continued in explanation to Mrs. Fane--"you know that poor
papa has been the whole of Guion, Maxwell & Guion since Mr. Maxwell
died. Well, then, he's to take in a partner or two, and gradually shift
his business into their hands. That wouldn't take more than a couple of
years at longest. Then he's going to retire, and come to live near me in
England. Rupert says there's a small place close to Heneage that would
just suit him. Papa has always liked the English hunting country, and
so--"

"And so everything will be for the best," Rodney Temple finished.
"There's nothing like a fresh young mind, like a young lady's, for
settling business affairs. It would have taken you or me a long time to
work that plan out, wouldn't it, Henry? We should be worried over the
effect on our trusteeships and the big estates we've had the care of--"

"What about the big estates?"

Davenant noticed the tone in which Guion brought out this question,
though it was an hour later before he understood its significance. It
was a sharp tone, the tone of a man who catches an irritating word or
two among remarks he has scarcely followed. Temple apparently had meant
to call it forth, since he answered, with the slightest possible air of
intention:

"Oh, nothing--except what I hear."

While Miss Guion and Mrs. Fane chatted of their own affairs Davenant
remarked the way in which Henry Guion paused, his knife and fork fixed
in the chicken wing on his plate, and gazed at his old friend. He bent
slightly forward, too, looking, with his superb head and bust slightly
French in style, very handsome and imposing.

"Then you've been--hearing--things?"

Rodney Temple lowered his eyes in a way that confirmed Davenant--who
knew his former guardian's tricks of manner--in his suppositions. He
was so open in countenance that anything momentarily veiled on his part,
either in speech or in address, could reasonably be attributed to stress
of circumstances. The broad forehead, straight-forward eyes, and large
mouth imperfectly hidden by a shaggy beard and mustache, were of the
kind that lend themselves to lucidity and candor. Externally he was the
scholar, as distinct from the professional man or the "divine." His
figure--tall, large-boned, and loose-jointed--had the slight stoop
traditionally associated with study, while the profile was thrust
forward as though he were peering at something just out of sight. A
courtly touch in his style was probably a matter of inheritance, as was
also his capacity for looking suitably attired while obviously
neglectful of appearances. His thick, lank, sandy hair, fading to white,
and long, narrow, stringy beard of the same transitional hue were not
well cared for; and yet they helped to give him a little of the air of a
Titian or Velasquez nobleman. In answer to Guion now, he spoke without
lifting his eyes from his plate.

"Have I been hearing things? N-no; only that the care of big estates is
a matter of great responsibility--and anxiety."

"That's what I tell papa," Miss Guion said, warmly, catching the
concluding words. "It's a great responsibility and anxiety. He ought to
be free from it. I tell him my marriage is a providential hint to him to
give up work."

"Perhaps I sha'n't get the chance. Work may give up--me."

"I wish it would, papa. Then everything would be settled."

"Some things would be settled. Others might be opened--for discussion."

If Rodney Temple had not lifted his eyes in another significant look
toward Guion, Davenant would have let these sentences pass unheeded. As
it was, his attention was directed to possible things, or impossible
things, left unsaid. For a second or two he was aware of an odd
suspicion, but he brushed it away as absurd, in view of the
self-assurance with which Guion roused himself at last to enter into the
conversation, which began immediately to turn on persons of whom
Davenant had no knowledge.

The inability to follow closely gave him time to make a few superficial
observations regarding his host. In spite of the fact that Guion had
been a familiar figure to him ever since his boyhood, he now saw him at
really close range for the first time in years.

What struck him most was the degree to which Guion conserved his quality
of Adonis. Long ago renowned, in that section of American society that
clings to the cities and seaboard between Maine and Maryland, as a fine
specimen of manhood, he was perhaps handsomer now, with his noble,
regular features, his well-trimmed, iron-gray beard, and his splendid
head of iron-gray hair, than he had been in his youth. Reckoning
roughly, Davenant judged him to be sixty. He had been a personage
prominently in view in the group of cities formed by Boston, Cambridge,
and Waverton, ever since Davenant could remember him. Nature having
created Guion an ornament to his kind, fate had been equally beneficent
in ordaining that he should have nothing to do, on leaving the
university, but walk into the excellent legal practice his grandfather
had founded, and his father had brought to a high degree of honor as
well as to a reasonable pitch of prosperity. It was, from the younger
Guion's point of view, an agreeable practice, concerned chiefly with the
care of trust funds, in which a gentleman could engage without any
rough-and-tumble loss of gentility. It required little or nothing in the
way of pleadings in the courts or disputing in the market-place,
and--especially during the lifetime of the elder partners--left him
leisure for cultivating that graceful relationship to life for which he
possessed aptitudes. It was a high form of gracefulness, making it a
matter of course that he should figure on the Boards of Galleries of
Fine Arts and Colleges of Music, and other institutions meant to
minister to his country's good through the elevation of its taste.

"It's the sort of thing he was cut out for," Davenant commented to
himself, as his eye traveled from the high-bred face, where refinement
blended with authority, to the essentially gentlemanly figure, on which
the delicately tied cravat sat with the elegance of an orchid, while the
white waistcoat, of the latest and most youthful cut, was as neatly
adjusted to the person as the calyx to a bud. The mere sight of so much
ease and distinction made Davenant himself feel like a rustic in his
Sunday clothes, though he seized the opportunity of being in such
company to enlarge his perception of the fine points of bearing. It was
an improving experience of a kind which he only occasionally got.

He had an equal sense of the educational value of the conversation, to
which, as it skipped from country to country and from one important name
to another, it was a privilege to be a listener. His own career--except
for his two excursions round the world, conscientiously undertaken in
pursuit of knowledge--had been so somberly financial that he was
frankly, and somewhat naïvely, curious concerning the people who "did
things" bearing little or no relation to business, and who permitted
themselves sensations merely for the sake of having them. Olivia Guion's
friends, and Drusilla Fane's--admirals, generals, colonels, ambassadors,
and secretaries of embassy they apparently were, for the most part--had
what seemed to him an unwonted freedom of dramatic action. Merely to
hear them talked about gave him glimpses of a world varied and
picturesque, from the human point of view, beyond his dreams. In the
exchange of scraps of gossip and latest London anecdotes between Miss
Guion and Drusilla Fane, on which Henry Guion commented, Davenant felt
himself to be looking at a vivid but fitfully working cinematograph, of
which the scenes were snatched at random from life as lived anywhere
between Washington and Simla, or Inverness and Rome. The effect was both
instructive and entertaining. It was also in its way enlightening, since
it showed him the true standing in the world of this woman whom he had
once, for a few wild minutes, hoped to make his wife.

The dinner was half over before he began clearly to detach Miss Guion
from that environment which he would have called "the best Boston
society." Placing her there, he would have said before this evening that
he placed her as high as the reasonable human being could aspire to be
set. For any one whose roots were in Waverton, "the best Boston society"
would in general be taken as the state of blossoming. It came to him as
a discovery, made there and then, that Olivia Guion had seized this
elect state with one of her earliest tendrils, and, climbing on by way
of New York and Washington, had chosen to do her actual flowering in a
cosmopolitan air.

He had none of the resentment the home-bred American business man
habitually feels for this kind of eccentricity. Now that he had caught
the idea, he could see at a glance, as his mind changed his metaphor,
how admirably she was suited to the tapestried European setting. He was
conscious even of something akin to pride in the triumphs she was
capable of achieving on that richly decorated world-stage, much as
though she were some compatriot prima-donna. He could see already how
well, as the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, she would fill
the part. It had been written for her. Its strong points and its
subtleties were alike of the sort wherein she would shine.

This perception of his own inward applause explained something in regard
to himself about which he had been wondering ever since the beginning
of dinner--the absence of any pang, of any shade of envy, to see another
man win where he had been so ignominiously defeated. He saw now that it
was a field on which he never _could_ have won. Within "the best Boston
society" he might have had a chance, though even there it must have been
a poor one; but out here in the open, so to speak, where the prowess and
chivalry of Christendom furnished his competitors, he had been as little
in the running as a mortal at a contest of the gods. That he was no
longer in love with her he had known years ago; but it palliated
somewhat his old humiliation, it made the word failure easier to swallow
down, to perceive that his love, when it existed, had been doomed, from
the nature of things and in advance, to end in nothing, like that of the
nightingale for the moon.

       *       *       *       *       *

By dwelling too pensively on these thoughts he found he had missed some
of the turns of the talk, his attention awakening to hear Henry Guion
say:

"That's all very fine, but a man doesn't risk everything he holds dear
in the world to go cheating at cards just for the fun of it. You may
depend upon it he had a reason."

"Oh, he had a reason," Mrs. Fane agreed--"the reason of being hard up.
The trouble lay in its not being good enough."

"I imagine it was good enough for him, poor devil."

"But not for any one else. He was drummed out. There wasn't a soul in
the regiment to speak to him. We heard that he took another name and
went abroad. Anyhow, he disappeared. It was all he could do. He was
lucky to get off with that; wasn't he, Peter? wasn't he, father?"

"What he got off with," said Guion, "was a quality of tragic interest
which never pertains to the people who stick to the Street called
Straight."

"Oh, certainly," Mrs. Fane assented, dryly. "He did acquire that. But
I'm surprised to hear you commend it; aren't you, father? aren't you,
Peter?"

"I'm not commending it," Guion asserted; "I only feel its force. I've a
great deal of sympathy with any poor beggar in his--downfall."

"Since when?"

The look with which Rodney Temple accompanied the question once more
affected Davenant oddly. It probably made the same impression on Guion,
since he replied with a calmness that seemed studied: "Since--lately.
Why do you ask?"

"Oh, for no reason. It only strikes me as curious that your sympathy
should take that turn."

"Precisely," Miss Guion chimed in. "It's not a bit like you, papa. You
used to be harder on dishonorable things than any one."

"Well, I'm not now."

It was clear to Davenant by this time that in these words Guion was not
so much making a statement as flinging a challenge. He made that evident
by the way in which he sat upright, squared his shoulders, and rested a
large, white fist clenched upon the table. His eyes, too, shone,
glittered rather, with a light quite other than that which a host
usually turns upon his guests. To Davenant, as to Mrs. Temple, it seemed
as if he had "something on his mind"--something of which he had a
persistent desire to talk covertly, in the way in which an undetected
felon will risk discovery to talk about the crime.

No one else apparently at the table shared this impression. Rodney
Temple, with eyes pensively downcast, toyed with the seeds of a pear,
while Miss Guion and Mrs. Fane began speaking of some other incident of
what to them was above everything else, "the Service." A minute or two
later Olivia rose.

"Come, Cousin Cherry. Come, Drusilla," she said, with her easy,
authoritative manner. Then, apparently with an attempt to make up for
her neglect of Davenant, she said, as she held the door open for the
ladies to pass: "Don't let them keep you here forever. We shall be
terribly dull till you join us."

He was not too dense to comprehend that the words were conventional, as
the smile she flung him was perfunctory. Nevertheless, the little
attention pleased him.




II


The three men being left together, Davenant's conviction of inner
excitement on the part of his host was deepened. It was as if, on the
withdrawal of the ladies, Guion had less intention of concealing it. Not
that at first he said anything directly or acted otherwise than as a man
with guests to entertain. It was only that he threw into the task of
offering liqueurs and passing cigars a something febrile that caused his
two companions to watch him quietly. Once or twice Davenant caught
Temple's eye; but with a common impulse each hastily looked elsewhere.

"So, Mr. Davenant, you've come back to us. Got here only this afternoon,
didn't you? I wonder why you came. Having got out of a dull place like
Waverton, why should you return to it?"

Looking the more debonair because of the flush in his face and the gleam
in his eye, Guion seated himself in the place his daughter had left
vacant between his two guests. Both his movements and his manner of
speech were marked by a quick jerkiness, which, however, was not without
a certain masculine grace.

"I don't know that I've any better reason," Davenant laughed, snipping
off the end of his cigar, "than that which leads the ox to his
stall--because he knows the way."

"Good!" Guion laughed, rather loudly. Then, stopping abruptly, he
continued, "I fancy you know your way pretty well in any direction you
want to go, don't you?"

"I can find it--if I know where I'm going. I came back to Boston chiefly
because that was just what I didn't know."

"He means," Rodney Temple explained, "that he'd got out of his beat; and
so, like a wise man, he returns to his starting-point."

"I'd got out of something more than my beat; I'd got out of my element.
I found that the life of elegant leisure on which I'd embarked wasn't
what I'd been cut out for."

"That's interesting--very," Guion said. "How did you make the
discovery?"

"By being bored to death."

"Bored?--with all your money?"

"The money isn't much; but, even if it were, it couldn't go on buying me
a good time."

"That, of course, depends on what your idea of a good time may be;
doesn't it, Rodney?"

"It depends somewhat," Rodney replied, "on the purchasing power of
money. There are things not to be had for cash."

"I'm afraid my conception of a good time," Davenant smiled, "might be
more feasible without the cash than with it. After all, money would be a
doubtful blessing to a bee if it took away the task of going out to
gather honey."

"A bee," Guion observed, "isn't the product of a high and complex
civilization--"

"Neither am I," Davenant declared, with a big laugh. "I spring from the
primitive stratum of people born to work, who expect to work, and who,
when they don't work, have no particular object in living on."

"And so you've come back to Boston to work?"

"To work--or something."

"You leave yourself, I see, the latitude of--something."

"Only because it's better than nothing. It's been nothing for so long
now that I'm willing to make it anything."

"Make what--anything?"

"My excuse for remaining on earth. If I'm to go on doing that, I've got
to have something more to justify it than the mere ability to pay my
hotel bill."

"You're luckier than you know to be able to do that much," Guion said,
with one of his abrupt, nervous changes of position. "But you've been
uncommonly lucky, anyhow, haven't you? Made some money out of that mine
business, didn't you? Or was it in sugar?"

Davenant laughed. "A little," he admitted. "But, to any one like you,
sir, it would seem a trifle."

"To any one like me! Listen." He leaned forward, with feverish eyes, and
spoke slowly, tapping on the table-cloth as he did so. "For half a
million dollars I'd sell my soul."

Davenant resisted the impulse to glance at Temple, who spoke promptly,
while Guion swallowed thirstily a glass of cognac.

"That's a good deal for a soul, Henry. It's a large amount of the sure
and tangible for a very uncertain quantity of the impalpable and
problematical."

Davenant laughed at this more boisterously than the degree of humor
warranted. He began definitely to feel that sense of discomfort which in
the last half-hour he had been only afraid of. It was not the
commonplace fact that Guion might be short of money that he dreaded; it
was the possibility of getting a glimpse of another man's inner secret
self. He had been in this position more than once before--when men
wanted to tell him things he didn't want to know--when, whipped by
conscience or crazed by misfortune or hysterical from drink, they tried
to rend with their own hands the veil that only the lost or the
desperate suffer to be torn. He had noted before that it was generally
men like Guion of a high strung temperament, perhaps with a feminine
streak in it, who reached this pass, and because of his own reserve--his
rather cowardly reserve, he called it--he was always impelled to run
away from them. As there was no possibility of running away now, he
could only dodge, by pretending to misunderstand, what he feared Guion
was trying to say.

"So everything you undertook you pulled off successfully?" his host
questioned, abruptly.

"Not everything; some things. I lost money--often; but on the whole I
made it."

"Good! With me it was always the other way."

The pause that followed was an uneasy one, otherwise Temple would not
have seized on the first topic that came to hand to fill it up.

"You'll miss Olivia when she's gone, Henry."

"Y-yes; if she goes."

The implied doubt startled Davenant, but Temple continued to smoke
pensively. "I've thought," he said, after a puff or two at his cigar,
"I've thought you seemed to be anticipating something in the way of
a--hitch."

Guion held his cigar with some deliberation over an ash-tray, knocking
off the ash with his little finger as though it were a task demanding
precision.

"You'll know all about it to-morrow, perhaps--or in a few days at
latest. It can't be kept quiet much longer. I got the impression at
dinner that you'd heard something already."

"Nothing but gossip, Henry."

Guion smiled, but with a wince. "I've noticed," he said, "that there's a
certain kind of gossip that rarely gets about unless there's some cause
for it--on the principle of no smoke without fire. If you've heard
anything, it's probably true."

"I was afraid it might be. But in that case I wonder you allowed Olivia
to go ahead."

"I had to let fate take charge of that. When a man gets himself so
entangled in a coil of barbed wire that he trips whichever way he turns,
his only resource is to stand still. That's my case." He poured himself
out another glass of cognac, and tasted it before continuing. "Olivia
goes over to England, and gets herself engaged to a man I never heard
of. Good! She fixes her wedding-day without consulting me and
irrespective of my affairs. Good again! She's old enough to do it, and
quite competent. Meanwhile I lose control of the machine, so to speak. I
see myself racing on to something, and can't stop. I can only lie back
and watch, to see what happens. I've got to leave that to fate, or God,
or whatever it is that directs our affairs when we can no longer manage
them ourselves." He took another sip of cognac, and pulled for a minute
nervously at his cigar. "I thought at first that Olivia might be married
and get, off before anything happened. Now, it looks to me as if there
was going to be a smash. Rupert Ashley arrives in three or four days'
time, and then--"

"You don't think he'd want to back out, do you?"

"I haven't the remotest idea. From Olivia's description he seems like a
decent sort; and yet--"

Davenant got to, his feet. "Shouldn't you like me to go back to the
ladies? You want to talk to the professor--"

"No, no," Guion said, easily, pushing Davenant into his seat again.
"There's no reason why you shouldn't hear anything I have to say. The
whole town will know it soon. You can't conceal a burning house; and
Tory Hill is on fire. I may be spending my last night under its roof."

"They'll not rush things like that," Temple said, tying to speak
reassuringly.

"They haven't rushed things as it is. I've come to the end of a very
long tether. I only want you to know that by this time to-morrow night
I may have taken Kipling's Strange Ride with Morrowby Jukes to the Land
of the Living Dead. If I do, I sha'n't come back--accept bail, or that
sort of thing. I can't imagine anything more ghastly than for a man to
be hanging around among his old friends, waiting for a--for a"--he
balked at the word--"for a trial," he said at last, "that can have only
one ending. No! I'm ready to ride away when they call for me--but they
won't find me pining for freedom."

"Can't anything be done?"

"Not for me, Rodney. If Rupert Ashley will only look after Olivia, I
shan't mind what happens next. Men have been broken on the wheel before
now. I think I can go through it as well as another. But if Ashley
should fail us--and of course that's possible--well, you see why I feel
as I do about her falling out with the old Marquise. Aunt Vic has always
made much of her--and she's very well off--"

"Is there nothing to be expected in that quarter for yourself?"

Guion shook his head. "I couldn't ask her--not at the worst. In the
natural course of things Olivia and I would be her heirs--that is, if
she didn't do something else with her money--but she's still in the
early seventies, and may easily go on for a long time yet. Any help
there is very far in the future, so that--"

"Ashley, I take it, is a man of some means?"

"Of comfortable means--no more. He has an entailed property in the
Midlands and his pay. As he has a mother and two sisters to pension
off, Olivia begged to have no settlements made upon herself. He wanted
to do it, after the English fashion, but I think she showed good feeling
in declining it. Naturally, I approved of her doing it, knowing how many
chances there were that I mightn't be able to--to play up--myself."

After this conversation Davenant could not but marvel at the ease with
which their host passed the cigars again and urged him personally to
have another glass of Chartreuse. "Then suppose we join the ladies," he
added, when further hospitality was declined.

Guion took the time to fleck a few specks of cigar-ash from his
shirt-bosom and waistcoat, thus allowing Rodney Temple to pass out
first. When alone with Davenant he laid his hand upon the younger man's
arm, detaining him.

"It was hardly fair to ask you to dinner," he said, still forcing an
unsteady smile, "and let you in for this. I thought at first of putting
you off; but in the end I decided to let you come. To me it's been a
sort of dress-rehearsal--a foretaste of what it'll be in public. The
truth is, I'm a little jumpy. The rôle's so new to me that it means
something to get an idea of how to play it on nerve. I recall you as a
little chap," he added, in another tone, "when Tom Davenant and his wife
first took you. Got you out of an orphanage, didn't they, or something
like that? If I remember rightly, your name was Hall or Hale--"

"It was Hallett--Peter Hallett."

"Hallett, was it? Well, it will do no harm for a young Cæsar of finance
like you to see what you may come to if you're not careful. Morituri te
salutamus, as the gladiators used to say. Only I wish it was to be the
arena and the sword instead of the court-room and the Ride with Morrowby
Jukes."

Davenant said nothing, not because he had nothing to say, but because
his thoughts were incoherent. Perhaps what was most in the nature of a
shock to him was the sight of a man whom he both admired for his
personality and honored as a pillar of Boston life falling so tragically
into ruin. While it was true that to his financially gifted mind any
misuse of trust funds had the special heinousness that horse-lifting has
to a rancher, yet as he stood with Guion's hand on his shoulder he knew
that something in the depths of his being was stirred, and stirred
violently, that had rarely been affected before. He had once, as a boy,
saved a woman from drowning; he had once seen a man at an upper window
of a burning house turn back into the fire while the bystanders
restrained him, Davenant, from attempting an impossible rescue.
Something of the same unreasoning impulse rose up within him now--the
impulse to save--the kind of impulse that takes no account of the merit
of the person in peril, seeing only the danger.

But these promptings were dumb in him for the moment from lack of
co-ordination. The two or three things he might have said seemed to
strangle each other in the attempt to get right of way. In response to
Guion's confidences he could only mumble something incoherent and pass
on to the drawing-room door. It was a wide opening, hung with portieres,
through which he could see Olivia Guion standing by the crackling wood
fire, a foot on the low fender. One hand rested lightly on the
mantelpiece, while the other drew back her skirt of shimmering black
from the blaze. Drusilla Fane, at the piano, was strumming one of
Chopin's more familiar nocturnes.

He was still thinking of this glimpse when, a half-hour later, he said
to Rodney Temple, as they walked homeward in the moonlight: "I haven't
yet told you what I came back for."

"Well, what is it?"

"I thought--that is, I hoped--that if I did the way might open up for me
to do what might be called--well, a little good."

"What put that into your head?" was the old man's response to this
stammering confession.

"I suppose the thought occurred to me on general principles. I've always
understood it was the right thing to attempt."

"Oh, right. That's another matter. Doing right is as easy as drawing
breath. It's a habit, like any other. To start out to do good is much
like saying you'll add a cubit to your stature. But you can always do
right. Do right, and the good'll take care of itself."

Davenant reflected on this in silence as they tramped onward. By this
time they had descended Tory Hill, and were on the dike that outlines
the shores of the Charles.

By a common impulse both Temple and Davenant kept silent concerning
Guion. On leaving Tory Hill they had elected to walk homeward, the
ladies taking the carriage. The radiant moonlight and the clear, crisp
October air helped to restore Davenant's faculties to a normal waking
condition after the nightmare of Guion's hints. Fitting what he supposed
must be the facts into the perspective of common life, to which the
wide, out-of-door prospect offered some analogy, they were, if not less
appalling, at least less overwhelming. Without seeing what was to be
done much more clearly than he had seen an hour ago, he had a freer
consciousness of power--something like the matter-of-course assumption
that any given situation could be met with which he ordinarily faced the
world. That he lacked authority in the case was a thought that did not
occur to him--no more than it occurred to him on the day when he rescued
the woman from drowning, or on the night when he had dashed into the
fire to save a man.

It was not till they had descended the straggling, tree-shaded
street--along which the infrequent street-lamps threw little more light
that that which came from the windows shining placidly out on lawns--and
had emerged on the embankment bordering the Charles, that the events of
the evening began for Davenant to weave themselves in with that
indefinable desire that had led him back to Boston. He could not have
said in what way they belonged together; and yet he could perceive that
between them there was some such dim interpenetration as the distant
lamps of the city made through the silvery mist lying on the river and
its adjacent marshes like some efflorescence of the moonlight.

"The difficulty is," he said, after a long silence, "that it's often so
hard to know what _is_ right."

"No, it isn't."

The flat contradiction brought a smile to the young man's lips as they
trudged onward.

"A good many people say so."

"A good many people say foolish things. It's hard to know what's right
chiefly when you're not in a hurry to do it."

"Aren't there exceptions to that rule?"

"I allowed for the exceptions. I said _chiefly_."

"But when you _do_ want to do it?"

"You'll know what it is. There'll be something to tell you."

"And this something to tell you? What do you call it?"

"Some call it conscience. Some call it God. Some call it neither."

Davenant reflected again.

"And you? What do you call it?"

"I can't see that anything would be gained by telling you. That sort of
knowledge isn't of much use till it's worked out for oneself. At least,
it wouldn't be of much use to you."

"Why not to me?"

"Because you've started out on your own voyage of discovery. You'll
bring back more treasures from that adventure than any one can give
you."

These things were said crustily, as though dragged from a man thinking
of other matters and unwilling to talk. More minutes went by before
Davenant spoke again.

"But doesn't it happen that what you call the 'something-to-tell-you'
tells you now and then to do things that most people would call rather
wild--or crazy?"

"I dare say."

"So what then?"

"Then you do them."

"Oh, but--"

"If there's an 'Oh, but', you don't. That's all. You belong to the many
called, but not to the few chosen."

"But if things _are_ wild--I'm thinking of something in particular--"

"Then you'd better leave it alone, unless you're prepared to be
considered a wild man. What Paul did was wild--and Peter--and Joan of
Arc--and Columbus--and a good many others. True they were well punished
for their folly. Most of them were put in irons, and some of them got
death."

"I shouldn't dream of classing myself in their company."

"Every one's in their company who feels a big impulse and has the
courage of it. The trouble with most of us is that we can do the feeling
all right; but when it comes to the execution--well, we like to keep on
the safe side, among the sane."

"So that," Davenant began, stammeringly, "if a fellow got something into
his head--something that couldn't be wrong, you know--something that
would be right--awfully right in its way, but in a way that most people
would consider all wrong--or wild, as I said before--you'd advise
him--?"

"I shouldn't advise him at all. Some things must be spontaneous, or
they're of little use. If a good seed in good ground won't germinate of
its own accord, words of counsel can't help it. But here we are at home.
You won't come in just yet? Very well; you've got your latch-key."

"Good-night, sir. I hope you're not going to think me--well, altogether
an idiot."

"Very likely I shall; but it'll be nothing if I do. If you can't stand a
little thing like that you'd better not have come back with the ideas
that have brought you."




III


Davenant turned away into the moonlit mist. Through it the electric
lamps of Boston, curving in crescent lines by the water's edge, or
sprinkled at random over the hill which the city climbs, shone for him
with the steadiness and quiet comfort inherent in the familiar and the
sure after his long roaming. Lighting a cigarette, he strode along the
cement pavement beside the iron railing below which the river ran
swiftly and soundlessly. At this late hour of the evening he had the
embankment to himself, save for an occasional pair of lovers or a group
of sauntering students. Lights from the dignified old houses--among
which was Rodney Temple's--overlooking the embankment and the Charles
threw out a pleasant glow of friendliness. Beyond the river a giant
shadow looming through the mist reminded him of the Roman Colisseum seen
in a like aspect, the resemblance being accentuated in his imagination
by the Stadium's vast silence, by its rows upon rows of ghostly gray
sedilia looking down on a haunted, empty ring. His thoughts strayed to
Rome, to Cairo, to Calcutta, to Singapore, to the stages of those two
patient journeys round the world, made from a sense of duty, in search
of a widening of that sheerly human knowledge which life had hitherto
denied him. Having started from London and got back to London again, he
saw how imperfectly he had profited by his opportunities, how much he
had missed. It was characteristic of him to begin all over again, and
more thoroughly, conscientiously revisiting the Pyramids, the Parthenon,
and the Taj Mahal, endeavoring to capture some of that true spirit of
appreciation of which he read in books.

In his way he was not wholly unsuccessful, since by dint of steady
gazing he heightened his perceptive powers, whether it were for Notre
Dame, the Sistine Madonna, or the Alps, each of which he took with the
same seriousness. What eluded him was precisely that human element which
was the primary object of his quest. He learned to recognize the beauty
of a picture or a mountain more or less at sight; but the soul of these
things, of which he thought more than of their outward aspects, the soul
that looks through the eyes and speaks with the tongues of peoples,
remained inaccessible to his yearnings. He was always outside--never
more than a tourist. He made acquaintances by the wayside easily enough,
but only of the rootless variety, beginning without an introduction and
ending without a farewell. There was nothing that "belonged" to him,
nothing to which he himself "belonged."

It was the persistency of the defect that had marked most of his life,
even that portion of it spent in Boston and Waverton--the places he
called "home." He was their citizen only by adoption, as only by
adoption he was the son of Tom and Sarah Davenant. That intimate
claim--the claim on the family, the claim on the soil--which springs of
birth and antedates it was not his, and something had always been
lacking to his life because of the deficiency. Too healthily genial to
feel this want more than obscurely, he nevertheless had tried to remedy
it by resorting to the obvious means. He had tried to fall in love, with
a view to marriage and a family. Once, perhaps twice, he might have been
successful had it not been for the intrusive recollection of a moment,
years before, when a girl whom he knew to be proud without suspecting
how proud she was had in answer to the first passionate words he ever
uttered started to her feet, and, fanning herself languidly, walked
away. The memory of that instant froze on his tongue words that might
have made him happy, sending him back into his solitary ways. They were
ways, as he saw plainly enough, that led no whither; for which reason he
had endeavored, as soon as he was financially justified, to get out of
them by taking a long holiday and traveling round the world.

He was approaching the end of his second journey when the realization
came to him that as far as his great object was concerned the
undertaking had been a failure. He was as much outside the broader
current of human sympathies as ever. Then, all at once, he began to see
the reason why.

The first promptings to this discovery came to him one spring evening as
he stood on the deck of the steam-launch he had hired at Shanghai to go
up and down the Yangste-Kiang. Born in China, the son of a medical
missionary, he had taken a notion to visit his birthplace at Hankow. It
was a pilgrimage he had shirked on his first trip to that country, a
neglect for which he afterward reproached himself. All things
considered, to make it was as little as he could do in memory of the
brave man and woman to whom he owed his existence.

Before this visit it must be admitted, Rufus and Corinna Hallett, his
parents according to the flesh, had been as remote and mythical to the
mind of Peter Davenant as the Dragon's Teeth to their progeny, the
Spartans. Merely in the most commonplace kind of data he was but poorly
supplied concerning them. He knew his father had once been a zealous
young doctor in Graylands, Illinois, and had later become one of the
pioneers of medical enterprise in the mission field; he knew, too, that
he had already worked for some years at Hankow before he met and married
Miss Corinna Meecham, formerly of Drayton, Georgia, but at that time a
teacher in a Chinese school supported by one of the great American
churches. Events after that seemed to have followed rapidly. Within a
few years the babe who was to become Peter Davenant had seen the light,
the mother had died, and the father had perished as the victim of a
rising in the interior of Hupeh. The child, being taken to America, and
unclaimed by relatives, was brought up in the institution maintained for
such cases by the Missionary Board of the church to which his father and
mother had given their services. He had lived there till, when he was
seven years old, Tom and Sarah Davenant, childless and yet longing for
a child, had adopted him.

These short and simple annals furnished all that Davenant knew of his
own origin; but after the visit to Hankow the personality of his parents
at least became more vivid. He met old people who could vaguely recall
them. He saw entries in the hospital records made by his father's hand.
He stood by his mother's grave. As for his father's grave, if he had
one, it was like that of Moses, on some lonely Nebo in Hupeh known to
God alone. In the compound Davenant saw the spot on which his father's
simple house had stood--the house in which he himself was born--though a
wing of the modern hospital now covered it. It was a relief to him to
find that, except for the proximity of the lepers' ward and the opium
refuge, the place, with its trim lawns, its roses, its clematis, its
azaleas, its wistaria, had the sweetness of an English rectory garden.
He liked to think that Corinna Meecham had been able to escape from her
duties in the crowded, fetid, multi-colored city right outside the gates
to something like peace and decency within these quiet walls.

He was not a born traveler; still less was he an explorer. At the end of
three days he was glad to take leave of his hosts at the hospital, and
turn his launch down the river toward the civilization of Shanghai. But
it was on the very afternoon of his departure that the ideas came to him
which ultimately took him back to Boston, and of which he was now
thinking as he strolled through the silvery mist beside the Charles.

He had been standing then on the deck of his steam-launch gazing beyond
the river, with its crowding, outlandish junks, beyond the towns and
villages huddled along the banks, beyond walls gay with wistaria, beyond
green rice-fields stretching into the horizon, to where a flaming sunset
covered half the sky--a sunset which itself seemed hostile, mysterious,
alien, Mongolian. He was thinking that it was on just this scene that
his father and mother had looked year upon year before his birth. He
wondered how it was that it had had no prenatal influence on himself. He
wondered how it was that all their devotion had ended with themselves,
that their altruism had died when Corinna Meecham's soul had passed-away
and Rufus Hallett, like another Stephen, had fallen on his knees beneath
the missiles of the villagers to whom he was coming with relief. They
had spent their lives in the service of others; he had spent his in his
own. It was curious. If there was anything in heredity, he ought to have
felt at least some faint impulse from their zeal; but he never had. He
could not remember that he had ever done anything for any one. He could
not remember that he had ever seen the need of it. It was curious. He
mused on it--mused on the odd differences between one generation and
another, and on the queer way in which what is light to the father will
sometimes become darkness in the son.

It was then that he found the question raising itself within him, "Is
that what's wrong with me?"

The query took him by surprise. It was so out of keeping with his
particular kind of self-respect that he found it almost droll. If he
had never _given_ himself to others, as his parents had, he had
certainly paid the world all he owed it. He had nothing wherewith to
reproach himself on that score. It had been a matter of satisfaction
amounting to pride that he had made his bit of money without resorting
in any single instance to methods that could be considered shady. If
complaint or criticism could not reach him here, it could not reach him
anywhere. Therefore the question as to whether there was anything wrong
in his attitude toward others was so patently absurd that it could
easily be dismissed.

He dismissed it promptly, but it came again. It came repeatedly during
that spring and summer. It forced itself on his attention. It became, in
its way, the recurrent companion of his journey. It turned up
unexpectedly at all sorts of times and in all sorts of places, and on
each occasion with an increased comprehension on his side of its
pertinence. He could look back now and trace the stages by which his
understanding of it had progressed. There was a certain small happening
in a restaurant at Yokohama; there was an accident on the dock at
Vancouver; there was a conversation on a moonlight evening up at Banff;
there was an incident during a drive in the Yosemite; these were
mile-stones on the road by which his mind had traveled on to seize the
fact that the want of touch between him and his fellow-men might be due
to the suppression of some essentially human force within himself. It
came to him that something might, after all, have been transmitted from
Hupeh and Hankow of which he had never hitherto suspected the existence.

It cannot be said that his self-questioning had produced any answer more
definite than that before he found himself journeying back toward
Boston. The final impulse had been given him while he was still
loitering aimlessly in Chicago by a letter from Mrs. Temple.

"If you have nothing better to do, dear Peter," she wrote, "we shall be
delighted if you can come to us for a week or two. Dear Drusilla is with
us once again, and you can imagine our joy at having her. It would seem
like old times if you were here to complete the little circle. The room
you used to have in your college vacations--after dear Tom and Sarah
were taken from us--is all ready for you; and Drusilla would like to
know you were here to occupy it just as much as we."

In accepting this invitation Davenant knew himself to be drawn by a
variety of strands of motive, no one of which had much force in itself,
but which when woven together lent one another strength. Now that he had
come, he was glad to have done it, since in the combination of
circumstances he felt there must be an acknowledged need of a young man,
a strong man, a man capable of shouldering responsibilities. He would
have been astonished to think that that could be gainsaid.

The feeling was confirmed in him after he had watched the tip of his
smoked-out cigarette drop, like a tiny star, into the current of the
Charles, and had re-entered Rodney Temple's house.

"Here's Peter!"

It was Drusilla's voice, with a sob in it. She was sitting on the
stairs, three steps from the top, huddled into a voluminous
mauve-and-white dressing-gown. In the one dim light burning in the hall
her big black eyes gleamed tragically, as those of certain animals gleam
in dusk.

"Oh, Peter, dear, I'm so glad you've come! The most awful thing has
happened."

That was Mrs. Temple who, wrapped in something fleecy in texture and
pink in hue, was crouched on the lowest step, looking more than ever
like a tea-cozy dropped by accident.

"What's the matter?" Davenant asked, too deeply astonished even to take
off his hat. "Is it burglars? Where's the professor?"

"He's gone to bed. It isn't burglars. I wish it was. It's something far,
far worse. Collins told Drusilla. Oh, I know it's true--though Rodney
wouldn't say so. I simply ... _know_ ... it's ... _true_."

"Oh, it's true," Drusilla corroborated. "I knew that the minute Collins
began to speak. It explains everything--all the little queernesses I've
noticed ever since I came home--and everything."

"What is it?" Peter asked again. "Who's Collins? And what has he said?"

"It isn't a he; it's a she," Drusilla explained. "She's my maid. I knew
the minute I came into the room that she'd got something on her mind--I
knew it by the way she took my wrapper from the wardrobe and laid it on
the bed. It was too awful!"

"What was too awful? The way she laid your wrapper on the bed?"

"No; what she told me. And I _know_ it's true."

"Well, for the Lord's sake, Drusilla, what is it?"

Drusilla began to narrate. She had forborne, she said, to put any
questions till she was being "undone"; but in that attitude, favorable
for confidence, she had asked Collins over her shoulder if anything
troubled her, and Collins had told her tale. Briefly, it was to the
effect that some of the most distinguished kitchens in Boston and
Waverton had been divided into two factions, one pro and the other
contra, ever since the day, now three weeks ago, when Miss Maggie
Murphy, whose position of honorable service at Lawyer Benn's enabled her
to profit by the hints dropped at that eminent man's table, had
announced, in the servant's dining-room of Tory Hill itself, that Henry
Guion was "going to be put in jail." He had stolen Mrs. Clay's money,
and Mrs. Rodman's money, "and a lot of other payple's money, too," Miss
Murphy was able to affirm--clients for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had
long acted as trustees--and was now to be tried and sentenced, Lawyer
Benn himself being put in charge of the affair by the parties wronged.
Drusilla described the sinking of her own heart as these bits of
information were given her, though she had not failed to reprimand
Collins for the repetition of foolish gossip. This, it seemed, had put
Collins on her mettle in defense of her own order, and she had replied
that, if it came to that, m'm, the contents of the waste-paper baskets
at Tory Hill, though slightly damaged, had borne ample testimony to the
truth of the tale as Miss Maggie Murphy told it. If Mrs. Fane required
documentary evidence, Collins herself was in a position to supply it,
through the kindness of her colleagues in Henry Guion's employ.

Davenant listened in silence. "So the thing is out?" was his only
comment.

"It's out--and all over the place," Drusilla answered, tearfully. "We're
the only people who haven't known it--but it's always that way with
those who are most concerned."

"And over three hundred guests invited to Olivia's wedding next Thursday
fortnight! And the British Military Attaché coming from Washington! And
Lord Woolwich from Ottawa! What's to happen _I_ don't know."

Mrs. Temple raised her hands and let them drop heavily.

"Oh, Peter, can't you do anything?"

"What can he do, child? If Henry's been making away with all that money
it would take a fortune to--"

"Oh, men can do things--in business," Drusilla asserted. "I know they
can. Banks lend them money, _don't_ they, Peter? Banks are always
lending money to tide people over. I've often heard of it. Oh, Peter,
_do_ something. I'm so glad you're here. It seems like a providence."

"Colonel Ashley will be here next week, too," Mrs. Temple groaned, as
though the fact brought comfort.

"Oh, mother dear, don't _speak_ of him!" Drusilla put up her two hands,
palms outward, before her averted face, as though to banish the
suggestion. "If you'd ever known him you'd see how impossible--how
_impossible_--this kind of situation is for a man like him. Poor, poor
Olivia! It's impossible for her, too, I know; but then we
Americans--well, we're more used to things. But one thing is certain,
anyhow," she continued, rising in her place on the stairs and stretching
out her hand oratorically: "If this happens I shall never go back to
Southsea--never, never!--no, nor to Silchester. With my temperament I
couldn't face it. My career will be over. There'll be nothing left for
_me_, mother dear, but to stay at home with father and you."

Mrs. Temple rose, sighing heavily. "Well, I suppose we must go to bed,
though I must say it seems harder to do that than almost anything. None
of us'll sleep."

"Oh, Peter, _won't_ you do something?"

Drusilla's hands were clasped beneath an imploring face, slightly tilted
to one side. Her black hair had begun to tumble to her shoulders.

"I'll--I'll think it over," was all he could find to answer.

"Oh, _thank_ you, Peter! I must say it seems like a providence--your
being here. With my temperament I always feel that there's nothing like
a big strong man to lean on."

The ladies retired, leaving him to put out the light. For a long time he
stood, as he had entered, just inside the front door leaning on his
stick and wearing his hat and overcoat. He was musing rather than
thinking, musing on the odd way in which he seemed almost to have been
waited for. Then, irrelevantly perhaps, there shot across his memory the
phrases used by Rodney Temple less than an hour ago:

"Some call it conscience. Some call it God. Some call it neither. But,"
he added, slowly, "some _do_ call it God."




IV


Closing the door behind his departing guests, Guion stood for a minute,
with his hand still on the knob, pressing his forehead against the
woodwork. He listened to the sound of the carriage-wheels die away and
to the crunching tread of the two men down the avenue.

"The last Guion has received the last guest at Tory Hill," he said to
himself. "That's all over--all over and done with. Now!"

It was the hour to which he had been looking forward, first as an
impossibility, then as a danger, and at last as an expectation, ever
since the day, now some years ago, when he began to fear that he might
not be able to restore all the money he had "borrowed" from the
properties in his trust. Having descried it from a long way off, he knew
that with reasonable luck it could not overtake him soon. There were
many chances, indeed, that it might never overtake him at all. Times
might change; business might improve; he might come in for the money he
expected from his old Aunt de Melcourt; he might die. If none of these
things happened, there were still ways and means by which he might make
money in big strokes and "square himself" without any one ever being
the wiser. He had known of cases, or, at least, he had suspected them,
in which men in precisely his position had averted by daring play the
deadliest peril and gone down into honored graves. Fortune had generally
favored him hitherto, and probably would favor him again.

So after the first dreadful days of seeing his "mistakes," and, in his
recoil, calling himself by opprobrious names, he began to get used to
his situation and boldly to meet its requirements. That he would prove
equal to them he had scarcely any doubt. It was, in fact, next to
inconceivable that a man of his antecedents and advantages should be
unable to cope with conditions that, after all, were not wholly
exceptional in the sordid history of business.

He admitted that the affair was sordid, while finding an excuse for his
own connection with it in the involuntary defilement that comes from
touching pitch. It was impossible, he said, for a man of business not to
touch pitch, and he was not a man of business of his own accord. The
state of life had been forced on him. He was a trustee of other people's
property by inheritance, just as a man becomes a tsar. As a career it
was one of the last he would have chosen. Had he received from his
father an ample personal fortune instead of a mere lucrative practice he
would have been a country gentleman, in the English style, with, of
course, a house in town. Born with a princely aptitude for spending his
own money, he felt it hard that he should have been compelled to make it
his life's work to husband that of others. The fact that he had always,
to some extent been a square man in a round hole seemed to entitle him
to a large share of moral allowance, especially in his judgment on
himself. He emphasized the last consideration, since it enabled him, in
his moments of solitude, to look himself more straightly in the face. It
helped him to buttress up his sense of honor, and so his sense of
energy, to be able to say, "I am still a gentleman."

He came in time to express it otherwise, and to say, "I must still play
the gentleman." He came to define also what he meant by the word
_still_. The future presented itself as a succession of stages, in which
this could not happen till that had happened, nor the final disaster
arrive till all the intervening phases of the situation had been passed.
He had passed them. Of late he had seen that the flames of hell would
get hold upon him at that exact instant when, the last defense having
been broken down and the last shift resorted to, he should turn the key
on all outside hope, and be alone with himself and the knowledge that he
could do no more. Till then he could ward them off, and he had been
fighting them to the latest second. But on coming home from his office
in Boston that afternoon he had told himself that the game was up.
Nothing as far as he could see would give him the respite of another
four and twenty hours. The minutes between him and the final
preparations could be counted with the finger on the clock.

In the matter of preparation the most important detail would be to tell
Olivia. Hoping against hope that this would never become necessary, he
had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel. But
he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered
with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now,
when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed. As he turned into
his own grounds that day it seemed to him that his deadness of emotion
was such that he could carry the thing through mechanically, as a
skilled surgeon uses a knife. If he found her at tea in the drawing-room
he might tell her then.

He found her at tea, but there were people with her. He was almost
sorry; and yet it keyed him up to see that there was some necessity "to
still play the gentleman." He played it, and played it well--with much
of his old-time ease. The feat was so extraordinary as to call out a
round of mental applause for himself; and, after all, he reflected,
there would be time enough in the evening.

But tea being over, Miss Guion announced that Mr. and Mrs. Temple and
Drusilla Fane were coming informally to dinner, bringing with them a
guest of theirs, "some one of the name of Davenant." For an instant he
felt that he must ask her to telephone and put them off, but on second
thoughts it seemed better to let them come. It would be in the nature of
a reprieve, not so much for himself as for Olivia. It would give her one
more cheerful evening, the last, perhaps, in her life. Besides--the
suggestion was a vague one, sprung doubtless of the hysterical element
in his suppressed excitement--he might test his avowals on Temple and
Davenant, getting a foretaste of what it would be to face the world. He
formed no precise intention of doing that; he only allowed his mind to
linger on the luxury of trying it. He had suspected lately that Rodney
Temple knew more of his situation than he had ever told him, so that the
way to speak out would be cleared in advance; and as for the man of the
name of Davenant--probably Tom Davenant's adopted son, who was said to
have pulled off some good things a few years ago--there would be, in
humbling himself before one so successful, a morbid joy of the kind the
devotee may get in being crushed by an idol.

In this he was not mistaken. While they were there he was able to draw
from his own speeches, covert or open, the relief that comes to a man in
pain from moaning. Now that they were gone, however, the last extraneous
incident that could possibly stand between him and the beginning of the
end had passed. The moment he had foreseen, as one foresees death, was
on him; so, raising his head from the woodwork of the doorway, he braced
himself, and said, "Now!"

At almost the same instant he heard the rustle of his daughter's skirts
as she came from the drawing-room on her way up-stairs. She advanced
slowly down the broad hail, the lights striking iridescent rays from the
trimmings of her dress. The long train, adding to her height, enhanced
her gracefulness. Only that curious deadness of sensation of which he
had been aware all day--the inability to feel any more that comes from
too much suffering--enabled him to keep his ground before her. He did
keep it, advancing from the doorway two or three steps toward her, till
they met at the foot of the stairway.

"Have you enjoyed your evening?" were the words he found himself saying,
though they were far from those he had at heart. He felt that his smile
was ghastly; but, as she seemed not to perceive it, he drew the
conclusion that the ghastliness was within.

She answered languidly. "Yes, so so. It might have been pleasanter if it
hadn't been for that awful man."

"Who? Young Davenant? I don't see anything awful about him."

"I dare say there isn't, really--in his place. He may be only prosy.
However," she added, more brightly, "it doesn't matter for once. Good
night, papa dear. You look tired. You ought to go to bed. I've seen to
the windows in the drawing-room, but I haven't put out the lights."

Having kissed him and patted him on the cheek, she turned to go up the
stairway. He allowed her to ascend a step or two. It was the minute to
speak.

"I'm sorry you feel that way about young Davenant. I rather like him."

He had not chosen the words. They came out automatically. To discuss
Davenant offered an excuse for detaining her, while postponing the blow
for a few minutes more.

"Oh, men would," she said, indifferently, without turning round. "He's
their style."

"Which is to his discredit?"

"Not to his discredit, but to his disadvantage. I've noticed that what
they call a man's man is generally something of a bore."

"Davenant isn't a bore."

"Isn't he? Well, I really didn't notice in particular. I only remember
that he used to be about here years ago--and I didn't like him. I
suppose Drusilla has to be civil to him because he was Cousin Rodney's
ward."

She had paused on the landing at the angle of the staircase.

"He's good-looking," Guion said, in continued effort to interpose the
trivial between himself and what he had still to tell her.

"Oh, that sort of Saxon giant type is always good-looking. Of course.
And dull too."

"I dare say he isn't as dull as you think."

"He might be that, and still remain pretty dull, after the allowances
had been made. I know the type. It's awful--especially in the form of
the American man of business."

"I'm an American man of business myself."

"Yes; by misadventure. You're the business man made, but not born. By
nature you're a boulevardier, or what the newspapers call a 'clubman.' I
admire you more than I can say--everybody admires you--for making such a
success of a work that must always have been uncongenial at the least."

The opening was obvious. Nothing could have been more opportune. Two or
three beginnings presented themselves, and as he hesitated, choosing
between them, he moistened his lips and wiped the cold perspiration
from his brow. After all, the blessed apathy within him was giving way
and going to play him false! He had a minute of feeling as the condemned
man must feel when he catches sight of the guillotine.

Before his parched tongue could formulate syllables she mounted another
step or two of the staircase, and turned again, leaning on the banister
and looking over. He noticed--by a common trick of the perceptive powers
at crises of anguish--how the slender white pilasters, carved and
twisted in sets of four, in the fashion of Georgian houses like Tory
Hill, made quaint, graceful lines up and down the front of her black
gown.

"It's really true--what I say about business, papa," she pursued. "I'm
very much in earnest, and so is Rupert. I do wish you'd think of that
place near Heneage. It will be so lovely for me to feel you're there;
and there can't be any reason for your going on working any longer."

"No; there's no reason for that," he managed to say.

"Well then?" she demanded, with an air of triumph. "It's just as I said.
You owe it to every one, you owe it to me, you owe it to yourself above
all, to give up. It might have been better if you'd done it long ago."

"I couldn't," he declared, in a tone that sounded to his own ears as a
cry. "I tried to, ... but things were so involved ... almost from the
first...."

"Well, as long as they're not involved now there's no reason why it
shouldn't be better late than never."

"But they _are_ involved now," he said, with an intensity so poignant
that he was surprised she didn't notice it.

"Then straighten them out. Isn't that what we've been saying all along,
Cousin Rodney and I? Take a partner; take two partners. Cousin Rodney
says you should have done it when Mr. Maxwell died, or before--"

"I couldn't.... Things weren't shipshape enough ... not even then."

"I'm sure it could be managed," she asserted, confidently; "and if you
don't do it now, papa, when I'm being married and going away for good,
you'll never do it at all. That's my fear. I don't want to live over
there without you, papa; and I'm afraid that's what you're going to let
me in for." She moved from the banister, and continued her way upward,
speaking over her shoulder as she ascended. "In the mean time, you
really _must_ go to bed. You look tired and rather pale--just as I do
after a dull party. Good night; and _don't_ stay up."

She reached the floor above, and went toward her room. He felt
strangled, speechless. There was a sense of terror too in the thought
that his nerve, the nerve on which he had counted so much, was going to
fail him.

"Olivia!"

His voice was so sharp that she hurried back to the top of the stairs.

"What is it, papa? Aren't you well?"

It was the sight of her face, anxious and suddenly white, peering down
through the half-light of the hall that finally unmanned him. With a
heart-sick feeling he turned away from the stairway.

"Yes; I'm all right. I only wanted you to know that ... that ... I shall
be working rather late. You mustn't be disturbed ... if you hear me
moving about."

He would have upbraided himself more bitterly for his cowardice had he
not found an excuse in the thought that, after all, there would be time
in the morning. It was best that she should have the refreshment of the
night. The one thing important was that she should not have the shock of
learning from others on the morrow that he was not coming back--that he
was going to Singville. Should he go there at all, he was determined to
stay. Since he had no fight to put up, it was better that his going
should be once for all. The thought of weeks, of months, perhaps, of
quasi-freedom, during which he should be parading himself "on bail," was
far more terrible to him than that of prison. He must prepare her for
the beginning of his doom at all costs to himself; but, he reasoned, she
would be more capable of taking the information calmly in the daylight
of the morning than now, at a few minutes of midnight.

It was another short reprieve, enabling him to give all his attention to
the tasks before him. If he was not to come back to Tory Hill he must
leave his private papers there, his more intimate treasures, in good
order. Certain things would have to be put away, others rearranged,
others destroyed. For the most part they were in the library, the room
he specially claimed as his own. Before setting himself to the work
there he walked through some of the other rooms, turning out the lights.

In doing so he was consciously taking a farewell. He had been born in
this house; in it he had spent his boyhood; to it he had come back as a
young married man. He had lived in it till his wife and he had set up
their more ambitious establishment in Boston, an extravagance from
which, perhaps, all the subsequent misfortunes could be dated. He had
known at the time that his father, had he lived, would have condemned
the step; but he himself was a believer in fortunate chances. Besides,
it was preposterous for a young couple of fashion to continue living in
a rambling old house that belonged to neither town nor country, at a
time when the whole trend of life was cityward. They had discussed the
move, with its large increase of expenditure, from every point of view,
and found it one from which, in their social position, there was no
escape. It was a matter about which they had hardly any choice.

So, too, a few years later, with the taking of the cottage at Newport.
It was forced on them. When all their friends were doing something of
the sort it seemed absurd to hesitate because of a mere matter of
means--especially when by hook or by crook the means could be procured.
Similar reasoning had attended their various residences abroad--in
London, Paris, Rome. Country-houses in England or villas on the Riviera
became matters of necessity, according to the demands of Olivia's entry
into the world of fashion or Mrs. Guion's health.

It was not till the death of the latter, some seven years ago, that
Guion, obliged to pause, was able to take cognizance of the degree to
which he had imperiled himself in the years of effort to maintain their
way of life. It could not be said that at the time he regretted what he
had done, but he allowed it to frighten him into some ineffectual
economies. He exchanged the cottage at Newport for one at Lenox, and,
giving up the house in Boston, withdrew to Tory Hill. Ceasing himself to
go into society, he sent his daughter abroad for a large portion of her
time, either in the care of Madame de Melcourt or, in London, under the
wing of some of the American ladies prominent in English life.

Having taken these steps, with no small pride in his capacity for
sacrifice, Guion set himself seriously to reconstruct his own fortune
and to repair the inroads he had made on those in his trust. It was a
matter in which he had but few misgivings as to his capacity. The making
of money, he often said, was an easy thing, as could be proved by the
intellectual grade of the men who made it. One had only to look about
one to see that they were men in whom the average of ability was by no
means high, men who achieved their successes largely by a kind of rule
of thumb. They got the knack of investment--and they invested. He
preferred the word investment to another which might have challenged
comment. They bought in a low market and sold in a high one--and the
trick was done. Some instinct--a _flair_, he called it--was required in
order to recognize, more or less at sight, those properties which would
quickly and surely appreciate in value; and he believed he possessed it.
Given the control of a few thousands as a point of departure, and the
financial ebb and flow, a man must be a born fool, he said, not to be
able to make a reasonable fortune with reasonable speed.

Within the office of Guion, Maxwell & Guion circumstances favored the
accession to power of the younger partner, who had hitherto played an
acquiescent rather than an active part. Mr. Maxwell was old and ailing,
though neither so ailing nor so old as to be blind to the need of new
blood, new money, and new influence in the fine old firm. His weakness
was that he hated beginning all over again with new men; so that when
Smith and Jones were proposed as possible partners he easily admitted
whatever objections Guion raised to them, and the matter was postponed.
It was postponed again. It slipped into a chronic condition of
postponement; and Mr. Maxwell died.

The situation calling then for adroitness on Guion's part, the fact that
he was able to meet it to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned,
increased his confidence in his own astuteness. True, it required some
manipulation, some throwing of dust into people's eyes, some making of
explanations to one person that could not be reconciled with those made
to another; but here again the circumstances helped him. His clients
were for the most part widows and old maids, many of them resident
abroad, for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had so long stood, in the matter
of income, for the embodiment of paternal care that they were ready to
believe anything and say anything and sign anything they were told to.
With the legal authorities to whom he owed account he had the advantage
of the house's high repute, making it possible to cover with formalities
anything that might, strictly speaking, have called for investigation.
Whatever had to be considered shifty he excused to himself on the ground
of its being temporary; while it was clearly, in his opinion, to the
ultimate advantage of the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs and the
Compton heirs and all the other heirs for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion
were _in loco parentis_, that he should have a free hand.

The sequel astonished rather than disillusioned him. It wrought in him
disappointment with the human race, especially as represented by the
Stock Exchange, without diminishing his confidence in his own judgment.
Through all his wild efforts not to sink he was upborne by the knowledge
that it was not his calculations that were wrong, but the workings of a
system more obscure than that of chance and more capricious than the
weather. He grew to consider it the fault of the blind forces that make
up the social, financial, and commercial worlds, and not his own, when
he was reduced to a frantic flinging of good money after bad as offering
the sole chance of working out his redemption.

And, now that it was all over, he was glad his wife had not lived to see
the end. That, at least, had been spared him. He stood before her
portrait in the drawing-room--the much-admired portrait by Carolus
Duran--and told her so. She was so living as she looked down on him--a
suggestion of refined irony about the lips and eyes giving personality
to the delicate oval of the face--that he felt himself talking to her as
they had been wont to talk together ever since their youth. In his way
he had stood in awe of her. The assumption of prerogative--an endowment
of manner or of temperament, he was never quite sure which--inherited by
Olivia in turn, had been the dominating influence in their domestic
life. He had not been ruled by her--the term would have been
grotesque--he had only made it his pleasure to carry out her wishes.
That her wishes led him on to spending money not his own was due to the
fact, ever to be regretted, that his father had not bequeathed him money
so much as the means of earning it. She could not be held responsible
for that, while she was the type of woman to whom it was something like
an outrage not to offer the things befitting to her station. There was
no reproach in the look he lifted on her now--nothing but a kind of
dogged, perverse thankfulness that she should have had the way of life
she craved, without ever knowing the price he was about to pay for it.

In withdrawing his glance from hers he turned it about on the various
objects in the room. Many of them had stood in their places since before
he was born; others he had acquired at occasional sales of Guion
property, so that, as the different branches of the family became
extinct or disappeared, whatever could be called "ancestral" might have
a place at Tory Hill; others he had collected abroad. All of them, in
these moments of anguish--the five K'ang-hsi vases on the mantelpiece,
brought home by some seafaring Guion of Colonial days, the armorial
"Lowestoft" in the cabinets, the Copley portraits of remote connections
on the walls, the bits of Chippendale and Hepplewhite that had belonged
to the grandfather who built Tory Hill--all of them took on now a kind
of personality, as with living look and utterance. He had loved them and
been proud of them; and as he turned out the lights, leaving them to
darkness, eyes could not have been more appealing nor lips more eloquent
than they in their mute farewell.

Returning to the library, he busied himself with his main undertaking.
He was anxious that nothing should be left behind that could give Olivia
additional pain, while whatever she might care to have, her mother's
letters to himself or other family documents, might be ready to her
hand. It was the kind of detail to which he could easily give his
attention. He worked methodically and phlegmatically, steeling himself
to a grim suppression of regret. He was almost sorry to finish the task,
since it forced his mind to come again face to face with facts. The
clock struck two as he closed the last drawer and knew that that part of
his preparation was completed.

In reading the old letters with their echoes of old incidents, old joys,
old jokes, old days in Paris, Rome, or England, he had been so wafted
back to another time that on pushing in the drawer, which closed with a
certain click of finality, the realization of the present rolled back
on his soul with a curious effect of amazement. For a few minutes it was
as if he had never understood it, never thought of it, before. They were
going to make him, Henry Guion, a prisoner, a criminal, a convict! They
were going to clip his hair, and shave his beard, and dress him in a
hideous garb, and shut him in a cell! They were going to give him
degrading work to do and degrading rules to keep, and degrading
associates to live with, as far as such existence could be called living
with any one at all. They were going to do this for year upon year, all
the rest of his life, since he never could survive it. He was to have
nothing any more to come in between him and his own thoughts--his
thoughts of Olivia brought to disgrace, of the Clay heirs brought to
want, of the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs deprived of half their
livelihood! He had called it that evening the Strange Ride with Morrowby
Jukes to the Land of the Living Dead, but it was to be worse than that.
It was to be worse than Macbeth with his visions of remorse; it was to
be worse than Vathek with the flame burning in his heart; it was to be
worse than Judas--who at least could hang himself.

He got up and went to a mirror in the corner of the room. The mere sight
of himself made the impossible seem more impossible. He was so fine a
specimen--he could not but know it!--so much the free man, the honorable
man, the man of the world! He tried to see himself with his hair clipped
and his beard shaven and the white cravat and waistcoat replaced by the
harlequin costume of the jailbird. He tried to see himself making his
own bed, and scrubbing his own floor, and standing at his cell door with
a tin pot in his hand, waiting for his skilly. It was so absurd, so out
of the question, that he nearly laughed outright. He was in a dream--in
a nightmare! He shook himself, he pinched himself, in order to wake up.
He was ready in sudden rage to curse the handsome, familiar room for the
persistence of its reality, because the rows of books and the Baxter
prints and the desks and chairs and electric lights refused to melt away
like things in a troubled sleep.

It was then that for the first time he began to taste the real measure
of his impotence. He was in the hand of the law. He was in the grip of
the sternest avenging forces human society could set in motion against
him; and, quibbles, shifts, and subterfuges swept aside, no one knew
better than himself that his punishment would be just.

It was a strange feeling, the feeling of having put himself outside the
scope of mercy. But there he was! There could never be a word spoken in
his defense, nor in any one's heart a throb of sympathy toward him. He
had forfeited everything. He could expect nothing from any man, and from
his daughter least of all. The utmost he could ask for her was that she
should marry, go away, and school herself as nearly as might be to
renounce him. That she should do it utterly would not be possible; but
something would be accomplished if pride or humiliation or resentment
gave her the spirit to carry her head high and ignore his existence.

It was incredible to think that at that very instant she was sleeping
quietly, without a suspicion of what was awaiting her. Everything was
incredible--incredible and impossible. As he looked around the room, in
which every book, every photograph, every pen and pencil, was a part of
him, he found himself once more straining for a hope, catching at
straws. He took a sheet of paper, and sitting down at his desk began
again, for the ten thousandth time, to balance feverishly his meagre
assets against his overwhelming liabilities. He added and subtracted and
multiplied and divided with a sort of frenzy, as though by dint of sheer
forcing the figures he could make them respond to his will.

Suddenly, with a gesture of mingled anger and hopelessness, he swept the
scribbled sheets and all the writing paraphernalia with a crash to the
floor, and, burying his face in his hands, gave utterance to a smothered
groan. It was a cry, not of surrender, but of protest--of infinite,
exasperated protest, of protest against fate and law and judgment and
the eternal principles of right and wrong, and against himself most of
all. With his head pressed down on the bare polished wood of his desk,
he hurled himself mentally at an earth of adamant and a heaven of brass,
hurled himself ferociously, repeatedly, with a kind of doggedness, as
though he would either break them down or dash his own soul to pieces.

"O God! O God!"

It was an involuntary moan, stifled in his fear of becoming hysterical,
but its syllables arrested his attention. They were the syllables of
primal articulation, of primal need, condensing the appeal and the
aspiration of the world. He repeated them:

"O God! O God!"

He repeated them again. He raised his head, as if listening to a voice.

"O God! O God!"

He continued to sit thus, as if listening.

It was a strange, an astounding thought to him that he might pray.
Though the earth of adamant were unyielding, the heaven of brass might
give way!

He dragged himself to his feet.

He believed in God--vaguely. That is, it had always been a matter of
good form with him to go to church and to call for the offices of
religion on occasions of death or marriage. He had assisted at the
saying of prayers and assented to their contents. He had even joined in
them himself, since a liturgical service was a principle in the church
to which he "belonged." All this, however, had seemed remote from his
personal affairs, his life-and-death struggles--till now. Now, all at
once, queerly, it offered him something--he knew not what. It might be
nothing better than any of the straws he had been clutching at. It might
be no more than the effort he had just been making to compel two to
balance ten.

He stood in the middle of the room under the cluster of electric lights
and tried to recollect what he knew, what he had heard, of this Power
that could still act when human strength had reached its limitations.
It was nothing very definite. It consisted chiefly of great phrases,
imperfectly understood: "Father Almighty," "Saviour of the World,"
"Divine Compassion" and such like. He did not reason about them, or try
to formulate what he actually believed. It was instinctively, almost
unconsciously, that he began to speak; it was brokenly and with a kind
of inward, spiritual hoarseness. He scarcely knew what he was doing when
he found himself saying, mentally:

"Save me!... I'm helpless!... I'm desperate!... Save me!... Work a
miracle!... Father!... Christ! Christ! Save my daughter!... We have no
one--but--but You!... Work a miracle! Work a miracle!... I'm a thief and
a liar and a traitor--but save me! I might do something yet--something
that might render me--worth salvation--but then--I might not.... Anyhow,
save me!... O God! Father Almighty!... Almighty! That means that You can
do anything!... Even now--You can do--anything!... Save us!... Save us
all!... Christ! Christ! Christ!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He knew neither when nor how he ceased, any more than when or how he
began. His most clearly defined impression was that of his spirit coming
back from a long way off to take perception of the fact that he was
still standing under the cluster of electric lights and the clock was
striking three. He was breathless, exhausted. His most urgent physic
need was that of air. He strode to the window-door leading out to the
terraced lawn, and, throwing it open, passed out into the darkness.

There was no mist at this height above the Charles. The night was still,
and the moon westering. The light had a glimmering, metallic essence, as
from a cosmic mirror in the firmament. Long shadows of trees and
shrubbery lay across the grass. Clear in the moonlit foreground stood an
elm, the pride of Tory Hill--springing as a single shaft for twice the
measure of a man--springing and spreading there into four giant
branches, each of which sprang and spread higher into eight--so
springing and spreading, springing and spreading still--rounded,
symmetrical, superb--till the long outermost shoots fell pendulous, like
spray from a fountain of verdure. The silence held the suggestion of
mighty spiritual things astir. At least the heaven was not of brass, if
the earth continued to be of adamant. On the contrary, the sky was high,
soft, dim, star-bestrewn, ineffable. It was spacious; it was free; it
was the home of glorious things; it was the medium of the eternal.

He was not reassured; he was not even comforted; what relief he got came
only from a feeling--a fancy, perhaps--that the weight had been eased,
that he was freed for a minute from the crushing pressure of the
inevitable. It would return again and break him down, but for the moment
it was lifted, giving him room and power to breathe. He did
breathe--long deep draughts of the cool night air that brought
refreshment and something like strength to struggle on.

He came back into the room. His pens and papers were scattered on the
floor, and ink from the overturned inkstand was running out on the
Oriental rug. It was the kind of detail that before this evening would
have shocked him; but nothing mattered now. He was too indifferent to
lift his hand and put the inkstand back into its place. Instead, he
threw himself on a couch, turning his face to the still open window and
drinking in with thirsty gasps the blessed, revivifying air.




V


Guion awoke in a chill, gray light, to find himself covered with a rug,
and his daughter, wrapped in a white dressing-gown, bending above him.
Over her shoulder peered the scared face of a maid. His first sensation
was that he was cold, his first act to pull the rug more closely about
him. His struggle back to waking consciousness was the more confused
because of the familiar surroundings of the library.

"Oh, papa, what's the matter?"

He threw the coverlet from him and dragged himself to a sitting posture.

"What time is it?" he asked, rubbing his eyes. "I must have dropped off
to sleep. Is dinner ready?"

"It's half-past six in the morning, papa dear. Katie found you here when
she came in to dust the room. The window was wide open and all these
things strewn about the floor. She put the rug on you and came to wake
me. What is it? What's happened? Let me send for the doctor."

With his elbow on his knee, he rested his forehead on his hand. The
incidents of the night came back to him. Olivia seated herself on the
couch beside him, an arm across his shoulder.

"I'm cold," was all he said.

"Katie, go and mix something hot--some whisky or brandy and hot
water--anything! And you, papa dear, go to bed. I'll call Reynolds and
he'll help you."

"I'm cold," he said again.

Rising, he crawled to the mirror into which he had looked last night,
shuddering at sight of his own face. The mere fact that he was still in
his evening clothes, the white waistcoat wrinkled and the cravat awry,
shocked him inexpressibly.

"I'm cold," he said for the third time.

But when he had bathed, dressed, and begun his breakfast, the chill left
him. He regained the mastery of his thoughts and the understanding of
his position. A certain exaltation of suffering which had upheld him
during the previous night failed him, however, now, leaving nothing but
a sense of flat, commonplace misery. Thrown into relief by the daylight,
the facts were more relentless--not easier of acceptance.

As he drank his coffee and tried to eat he could feel his daughter
watching him from the other end of the table. Now and then he screened
himself from her gaze by pretending to skim the morning paper. Once he
was startled. Reflected in the glass of a picture hanging on the
opposite wall he caught the image of a man in a blue uniform, who
mounted the steps and rang the door-bell.

"Who's that?" he asked, sharply. He dared not turn round to see.

"It's only the postman, papa darling. Who else should it be?"

"Yes; of course." He breathed again. "You mustn't mind me, dear. I'm
nervous. I'm--I'm not very well."

"I see you're not, papa. I saw it last night. I knew something was
wrong."

"There's something--very wrong."

"What is it? Tell me."

Leaning on the table, with clasped hands uplifted, the loose white lace
sleeves falling away from her slender wrists, she looked at him
pleadingly.

"We've--that is, I've--lost a great deal of money."

"Oh!" The sound was just above her breath. Then, after long silence, she
asked: "Is it much?"

He waited before replying, seeking, for the last time, some mitigation
of what he had to tell her.

"It's all we have."

"Oh!" It was the same sound as before, just audible--a sound with a
little surprise in it, a hint of something awed, but without dismay.

He forced himself to take a few sips of coffee and crumble a bit of
toast.

"I don't mind, papa. If that's what's troubling you so much, don't let
it any longer. Worse things have happened than that." He gulped down
more coffee, not because he wanted it, but to counteract the rising in
his throat. "Shall we have to lose Tory Hill?" she asked, after another
silence.

He nodded an affirmative, with his head down.

"Then you mean me to understand what you said just now--quite literally.
We've lost all we have."

"When everything is settled," he explained, with an effort, "we shall
have nothing at all. It will be worse than that, since I sha'n't be
able to pay all I owe."

"Yes; that _is_ worse," she assented, quietly.

Another silence was broken by his saying, hoarsely:

"You'll get married--"

"That will have to be reconsidered."

"Do you mean--on your part?"

"I suppose I mean--on everybody's part?"

"Do you think he would want to--you must excuse the crudity of the
question--do you think he would want to back out?"

"I don't know that I could answer that. It isn't quite to the point.
Backing out, as you call it, wouldn't be the process--whatever
happened."

He interrupted her nervously. "If this should fall through, dear, you
must write to your Aunt Vic. You must eat humble pie. You were too
toplofty with her as it was. She'll take you."

"Take me, papa? Why shouldn't I stay with you? I'd much rather."

He tried to explain. It was clearly the moment at which to do it.

"I don't think you understand, dear, how entirely everything has gone to
smash. I shall probably--I may say, certainly--I shall have to--to go--"

"I do understand that. But it often happens--especially in this
country--that things go to smash, and then the people begin again. There
was Lulu Sentner's father. They lost everything they had--and she and
her sisters did dressmaking. But he borrowed money, and started in from
the beginning, and now they're very well off once more. It's the kind
of thing one hears of constantly--in this country."

"You couldn't hear of it in my case, dear, because--well, because I've
done all that. I've begun again, and begun again. I've used up all my
credit--all my chances. The things I counted on didn't come off. You
know that that happens sometimes, don't you?--without any one being to
blame at all?"

She nodded. "I think I've heard so."

"And now," he went on, eager that she should begin to see what he was
leading her up to--"and now I couldn't borrow a thousand dollars in all
Boston, unless it was from some one who gave it to me as a charity. I've
borrowed from every one--every penny for which I could offer
security--and I owe--I owe hundreds of thousands. Do you see now how bad
it is?"

"I do see how bad it is, papa. I admit it's worse than I thought. But
all the same I know that when people have high reputations other people
trust them and help them through. Banks do it, don't they? Isn't that
partly what they're for? It was Pierpoint & Hargous who helped Lulu
Sentner's father. They stood behind him. She told me so. I'm positive
that with your name they'd do as much for you. You take a gloomy outlook
because you're ill. But there's no one in Boston--no one in New
England--more esteemed or trusted. When one can say, 'All is lost save
honor,' then, relatively speaking, there's very little lost at all."

He got up from the table and went to his room. After these words it was
physically impossible for him to tell her anything more. He had thought
of a means which might bring the fact home to her through the day by a
process of suggestion. Packing a small bag with toilet articles and
other necessaries, he left it in a conspicuous place.

"I want Reynolds to give it to my messenger in case I send for it," he
explained to her, when he had descended to the dining-room again.

She was still sitting where he left her, at the head of the table, pale,
pensive, but not otherwise disturbed.

"Does that mean that you're not coming home to-night?"

"I--I don't know. Things may happen to--to prevent me."

"Where should you go?--to New York?"

"No; not to New York."

He half hoped she would press the question, but when she spoke it was
only to say:

"I hope you'll try to come home, because I'm sure you're not well. Of
course I understand it, now I know you've had so much to upset you. But
I wish you'd see Dr. Scott. And, papa," she added, rising, "don't have
me on your mind--please don't. I'm quite capable of facing the world
without money. You mayn't believe it, but I am. I could do it--somehow.
I'm like you. I've a great deal of self-reliance, and a great deal of
something else--I don't quite know what--that has never been taxed or
called on. It may be pride, but it isn't only pride. Whatever it is,
I'm strong enough to bear a lot of trouble. I don't want you to think of
me at all in any way that will worry you."

She was making it so hard for him that he kissed her hastily and went
away. Her further enlightenment was one more detail that he must leave,
as he had left so much else, to fate or God to take care of. For the
present he himself had all he could attend to.

Half-way to the gate he turned to take what might prove his last look at
the old house. It stood on the summit of a low, rounded hill, on the
site made historic as the country residence of Governor Rodney. Governor
Rodney's "Mansion" having been sacked in the Revolution by his
fellow-townsmen, the neighborhood fell for a time into disrepute under
the contemptuous nickname of Tory Hill. On the restoration of order the
property, passed by purchase to the Guions, in whose hands, with a
continuity not customary in America, it had remained. The present house,
built by Andrew Guion, on the foundations of the Rodney Mansion, in the
early nineteenth century, was old enough according to New England
standards to be venerable; and, though most of the ground originally
about it had long ago been sold off in building-lots, enough remained to
give an impression of ample outdoor space. Against the blue of the
October morning sky the house, with its dignified Georgian lines, was
not without a certain stateliness--rectangular, three-storied, mellow,
with buff walls, buff chimneys, white doorways, white casements, white
verandas, a white balustrade around the top, and a white urn at each of
the four corners. Where, as over the verandas, there was a bit of
inclined roof, russet-red tiles gave a warmer touch of color. From the
borders of the lawn, edged with a line of shrubs, the town of Waverton,
merging into Cambridge, just now a stretch of crimson-and-orange
woodland, where gables, spires, and towers peeped above the trees,
sloped gently to the ribbon of the Charles. Far away, and dim in the
morning haze, the roofed and steepled crest of Beacon Hill rose in
successive ridges, to cast up from its highest point the gilded dome of
the State House as culmination to the sky-line. Guion looked long and
hard, first at the house, then at the prospect. He walked on only when
he remembered that he must reserve his forces for the day's
possibilities, that he must not drain himself of emotion in advance. If
what he expected were to come to pass, the first essential to his
playing the man at all would lie in his keeping cool.

So, on reaching his office, he brought all his knowledge of the world
into play, to appear without undue self-consciousness before his
stenographer, his bookkeeper, and his clerks. The ordeal was the more
severe because of his belief that they were conversant with the state of
his affairs. At least they knew enough to be sorry for him--of that he
was sure; though there was nothing on this particular morning to display
the sympathy, unless it was the stenographer's smile as he passed her in
the anteroom, and the three small yellow chrysanthemums she had placed
in a glass on his desk. In the nods of greeting between him and the men
there was, or there seemed to be, a studied effort to show nothing at
all.

Once safely in his own office, he shut the door with a sense of relief
in the seclusion. It crossed his mind that he should feel something of
the same sort when locked in the privacy of his cell after the hideous
publicity of the trial. From habit as well as from anxiety he went
straight to a mirror and surveyed himself again. Decidedly he had
changed since yesterday. It was not so much that he was older or more
care-worn--he was different. Perhaps he was ill. He felt well enough,
except for being tired, desperately tired; but that could be accounted
for by the way in which he had spent the night. He noticed chiefly the
ashy tint of his skin, the dullness of his eyes, and--notwithstanding
the fact that his clothes were of his usual fastidiousness--a curious
effect of being badly dressed more startling to him than pain. He was
careful to brush his beard and twist his long mustache into its usual
upward, French-looking curve, so as to regain as much as possible the
air of his old self, before seating himself at his desk to look over his
correspondence. There was a pile of letters, of which he read the
addresses slowly without opening any of them.

What was the use? He could do nothing. He had come to the end. He had
exhausted all the possibilities of the situation. Besides, his spirit
was broken. He could feel it. Something snapped last night within him
that would never be whole, never even be mended, again. It was not only
the material resources under his control that he had overtaxed, but the
spring of energy within himself, leaving him no more power of
resilience.

An hour may have passed in this condition of dull suspense, when he was
startled by the tinkle of his desk telephone. It was with some effort
that he leaned forward to answer the call. Not that he was afraid--now;
he only shrank from the necessity of doing anything.

"Mr. Davenant would like to see you," came the voice of the stenographer
from the anteroom.

There was nothing to reply but, "Ask Mr. Davenant to come in." He
uttered the words mechanically. He had not thought of Davenant since he
talked with Olivia on the stairs--a conversation that now seemed a
curiously long time ago.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you, Mr. Guion," the visitor said,
apologetically, with a glance at the letters on the desk.

"Not at all, my dear fellow," Guion said, cordially, from force of
habit, offering his hand without rising from the revolving chair. "Sit
down. Have a cigar. It's rather a sharp morning for the time of year."

The use of the conventional phrases of welcome helped him to emerge
somewhat from his state of apathy. Davenant declined the cigar, but
seated himself near the desk, in one of the round-backed office chairs.
Not being a man easily embarrassed by silences, he did not begin to
speak at once, and during the minute his hesitation lasted Guion
bethought him of Olivia's remark, "That sort of Saxon-giant type is
always good-looking." Davenant _was_ good-looking, in a clear-skinned,
clear-eyed way. Everything about him spoke of straight-forwardness and
strength, tempered perhaps by the boyish quality inseparable from fair
hair, a clean, healthily ruddy complexion, and a direct blue glance that
rested on men and things with a kind of pensive wondering. All the same,
the heavy-browed face on a big, tense neck had a frowning, perhaps a
lowering expression that reminded Guion of a young bull before he begins
to charge. The lips beneath the fair mustache might be too tightly and
too severely compressed, but the smile into which they broke over
regular white teeth was the franker and the more engaging because of the
unexpected light. If there was any physical awkwardness about him, it
was in the management of his long legs; but that difficulty was overcome
by his simplicity. It was characteristic of Guion to notice, even at
such a time as this, that Davenant was carefully and correctly dressed,
like a man respectful of social usages.

"I came in to see you, Mr. Guion," he began, apparently with some
hesitation, "about what we were talking of last night."

Guion pulled himself together. His handsome eyebrows arched themselves,
and he half smiled.

"Last night? What _were_ we talking of?"

"We weren't talking of it, exactly. You only told us."

"Only told you--what?" The necessity to do a little fencing brought
some of his old powers into play.

"That you wanted to borrow half a million dollars. I've come in to--to
lend you that sum--if you'll take it."

For a few seconds Guion sat rigidly still, looking at this man. The
import and bearing of the words were too much for him to grasp at once.
All his mind was prepared to deal with on the spur of the moment was the
fact of this offer, ignoring its application and its consequences as
things which for the moment lay outside his range of thought.

As far as he was able to reflect, it was to assume that there was more
here than met the eye. Davenant was too practised as a player of "the
game" to pay a big price for a broken potsherd, unless he was tolerably
sure in advance that within the potsherd or under it there lay more than
its value. It was not easy to surmise the form of the treasure nor the
spot where it was hidden, but that it was there--in kind satisfactory to
Davenant himself--Guion had no doubt. It was his part, therefore, to be
astute and wary, not to lose the chance of selling, and yet not to allow
himself to be overreached. If Davenant was playing a deep game, he must
play a deeper. He was sorry his head ached and that he felt in such poor
trim for making the effort. "I must look sharp," he said to himself;
"and yet I must be square and courteous. That's the line for me to
take." He tried to get some inspiration for the spurt in telling himself
that in spite of everything he was still a man of business. When at last
he began to speak, it was with something of the feeling of the
broken-down prize-fighter dragging himself bleeding and breathless into
the ring for the last round with a young and still unspent opponent.

"I didn't suppose you were in--in a position--to do that."

"I am." Davenant nodded with some emphasis.

"Did you think that that was what I meant when I--I opened my heart to
you last night?"

"No. I know it wasn't. My offer is inspired by nothing but what I feel."

"Good!" It was some minutes before Guion spoke again. "If I remember
rightly," he observed then, "I said I would sell my soul for half a
million dollars. I didn't say I wanted to borrow that amount."

"You may put it in any way you like," Davenant smiled. "I've come with
the offer of the money. I want you to have it. The terms on which you'd
take it don't matter to me."

"But they do to me. Don't you see? I'd borrow the money if I could. I
couldn't accept it in any other way. And I can't borrow it. I couldn't
pay the interest on it if I did. But I've exhausted my credit. I can't
borrow any more."

"You can borrow what I'm willing to lend, can't you?"

"No; because Tory Hill is mortgaged for all it will stand. I've nothing
else to offer as collateral--"

"I'm not asking for collateral. I'm ready to hand you over the money on
any terms you like or on no terms at all."

"Do you mean that you'd be willing to--to--to _give_ it to me?"

"I mean, sir," he explained, reddening a little, "that I want you to
have the money to _use_--now. We could talk about the conditions
afterward and call them what you please. If I understood you correctly
last night, you're in a tight place--a confoundedly tight place--"

"I am; but--don't be offended!--it seems to me you'd put me in a
tighter."

"How's that?"

[Illustration: "I'VE DONE WRONG, BUT I'M WILLING TO PAY THE PENALTY"]

"It's a little difficult to explain." He leaned forward, with one of his
nervous, jerky movements, and fingered the glass containing the three
chrysanthemums, but without taking his eyes from Davenant. So far he was
quite satisfied with himself. "You see, it's this way. I've done
wrong--very wrong. We needn't go into that, because you know it as well
as I. But I'm willing to pay the penalty. That is, I'm _ready_ to pay
the penalty. I've made up my mind to it. I've had to--of course. But if
I accepted your offer, you'd be paying it, not I."

"Well, why shouldn't I? I've paid other people's debts before now--once
or twice--when I didn't want to. Why shouldn't I pay yours, when I
should like the job?"

Davenant attempted, by taking something like a jovial tone, to carry the
thing off lightly.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't do it; there's only a reason why I
shouldn't let you."

"I don't see why you shouldn't let me. It mayn't be just what you'd
like, but it's surely better than--than what you wouldn't like at all."

Taking in the significance of these words, Guion colored, not with the
healthy young flush that came so readily to Davenant's face, but in
dabbled, hectic spots. His hand trembled, too, so that some of the water
from the vase he was holding spilled over on the desk. It was probably
this small accident, making him forget the importance of his rôle, that
caused him to jump up nervously and begin pacing about the room.

Davenant noticed then what he had not yet had time for--the change that
had taken place in Guion in less than twenty hours. It could not be
defined as looking older or haggard or ill. It could hardly be said to
be a difference in complexion or feature or anything outward. As far as
Davenant was able to judge, it was probably due, not to the loss of
self-respect, but to the loss of the pretense at self-respect; it was
due to that desolation of the personality that comes when the soul has
no more reason to keep up its defenses against the world outside it,
when the Beautiful Gate is battered down and the Veil of the Temple
rent, while the Holy of Holies lies open for any eye to rifle. It was
probably because this was so that Guion, on coming back to his seat,
began at once to be more explanatory than there was any need for.

"I haven't tried to thank you for your kind suggestion, but we'll come
to that when I see more clearly just what you want."

"I've told you that. I'm not asking for anything else."

"So far you haven't asked for anything at all; but I don't imagine
you'll be content with that. In any case," he hurried on, as Davenant
seemed about to speak, "I don't want you to be under any misapprehension
about the affair. There's nothing extenuating in it whatever--that is,
nothing but the intention to 'put it back' that goes with practically
every instance of"--he hesitated long--"every instance of embezzlement,"
he finished, bravely. "It began this way--"

"I don't want to know how it began," Davenant said, hastily. "I'm
satisfied with knowing the situation as it is."

"But I want to tell you. In proportion as I'm open with you I shall
expect you to be frank with me."

"I don't promise to be frank with you."

"Anyhow, I mean to set you the example."

He went on to speak rapidly, feverishly, with that half-hysterical
impulse toward confession from the signs of which Davenant had shrunk on
the previous evening. As Guion himself had forewarned, there was nothing
new or unusual in the tale. The situations were entirely the
conventional ones in the drama of this kind of unfaithfulness. The only
element to make it appealing, an element forcibly present to Davenant's
protective instincts, was the contrast between what Guion had been and
what he was to-day.

"And so," Guion concluded, "I don't see how I could accept this money
from you. Any honorable man--that is," he corrected, in some confusion,
"any _sane_ man--would tell you as much."

"I've already considered what the sane man and the honorable man would
tell me. I guess I can let them stick to their opinion so long as I have
my own."

"And what _is_ your opinion? Do you mind telling me? You understand that
what you're proposing is immoral, don't you?"

"Yes--in a way."

Guion frowned. He had hoped for some pretense at contradiction.

"I didn't know whether you'd thought of that."

"Oh yes, I've thought of it. That is, I see what you mean."

"It's compounding a felony and outwitting the ends of justice and--"

"I guess I'll do it just the same. It doesn't seem to be my special job
to look after the ends of justice; and as for compounding a
felony--well, it'll be something new."

Guion made a show of looking at him sharply. The effort, or the
pretended effort, to see through Davenant's game disguised for the
moment his sense of humiliation at this prompt acceptance of his own
statement of the case.

"All the same," he observed, trying to take a detached, judicial tone,
"your offer is so amazing that I presume you wouldn't make it unless you
had some unusual reason."

"I don't know that I have. In fact, I know I haven't."

"Well, whatever its nature, I should like to know what it is."

"Is that necessary?"

"Doesn't it strike you that it would be--in order? If I were to let you
do this for me you'd be rendering me an extraordinary service. We're
both men of business, men of the world; and we know that something for
nothing is not according to Hoyle."

Davenant looked at him pensively. "That is, you want to know what I
should be pulling off for myself?"

"That's about it."

"I don't see why that should worry you. If you get the money--"

"If I get the money I put myself in your power."

"What of that? Isn't it just as well to be in my power as in the power
of other people?"

Again Guion winced inwardly, but kept his self-control. He was not yet
accustomed to doing without the formulas of respect from those whom he
considered his inferiors.

"Possibly," he said, not caring to conceal a certain irritation; "but
even so I should like to know in case I _were_ in your power what you'd
expect of me."

"I can answer that question right away. I shouldn't expect anything at
all."

"Then you leave me more in the dark than ever."

Davenant still eyed him pensively. "Do I understand you to be suspicious
of my motives?"

"Suspicious might not be the right word. Suppose we said curious."

Davenant reflected. Perhaps it was his mastery of the situation that
gave him unconsciously a rock-like air of nonchalance. When he spoke it
was with a little smile, which Guion took to be one of condescension.
Condescension in the circumstances was synonymous with insolence.

"Well, sir, suppose I allowed you to remain curious? What then?"

They were the wrong words. It was the wrong manner. Guion looked up with
a start. His next words were uttered in the blind instinct of the
haughty-headed gentleman who thinks highly of himself to save the
moment's dignity.

"In that case I think we must call the bargain off."

Davenant shot out of his seat. He, too, was not without a current of hot
blood.

"All right, sir. It's for you to decide. Only, I'm sorry. Good-by!" He
held out his hand, which Guion, who was now leaning forward, toying with
the pens and pencils on the desk, affected not to see. A certain lack of
ease that often came over Davenant at moments of leave-taking or
greeting kept him on the spot. "I hoped," he stammered, "that I might
have been of some use to you, and that Miss Guion--"

Guion looked up sharply. "Has _she_ got anything to do with it?"

"Nothing," Davenant said, quickly, "nothing whatever."

"I didn't see how she _could_ have--" Guion was going on, when Davenant
interrupted.

"She has nothing to do with it whatever," he repeated. "I was only going
to say that I hoped she might have got through her wedding without
hearing anything about--all this--all this fuss."

In uttering the last words he had moved toward the door. His hand was on
the knob and he was about to make some repetition of his farewells when
Guion spoke again. He was leaning once more over the desk, his fingers
playing nervously with the pens and pencils. He made no further effort
to keep up his rôle of keen-sighted man of business. His head was bent,
so that Davenant could scarcely see his face, and when he spoke his
words were muffled and sullen.

"Half a million would be too much. Four hundred and fifty thousand would
cover everything."

"That would be all the same to me," Davenant said, in a matter-of-fact
tone.

But he went back to the desk and took his seat again.




VI


Having watched through the window her father pass down the avenue on his
way to town, Miss Guion reseated herself mechanically in her place at
the breakfast-table in order to think. Not that her thought could be
active or coherent as yet; but a certain absorption of the facts was
possible by the simple process of sitting still and letting them sink
in. As the minutes went by, it became with her a matter of sensation
rather than of mental effort--of odd, dream-like sensation, in which all
the protecting walls and clearly defined boundary-lines of life and
conduct appeared to be melting away, leaving an immeasurable outlook on
vacancy. To pass abruptly from the command of means, dignity, and
consideration out into a state in which she could claim nothing at all
was not unlike what she had often supposed it might be to go from the
pomp and circumstance of earth as a disembodied spirit into space. The
analogy was rendered the more exact by her sense, stunned and yet
conscious, of the survival of her own personality amid what seemed a
universal wreckage. This persistence of the ego in conditions so vast
and vague and empty as to be almost no conditions at all was the one
point on which she could concentrate her faculties.

It was, too, the one point on which she could form an articulated
thought. She was Olivia Guion still! In this slipping of the world from
beneath her feet she got a certain assurance from the affirmation of her
identity. She was still that character, compounded of many elements,
which recognized as its most active energies insistence of will and
tenacity of pride. She could still call these resources to her aid to
render her indestructible. Sitting slightly crouched, her hands clasped
between her knees, her face drawn and momentarily older, her lips set,
her eyes tracing absently the arabesques chased on the coffee-urn, she
was inwardly urging her spirit to the buoyancy that cannot sink, to the
vitality that rides on chaos. She was not actively or consciously doing
this; in the strictest sense she was not doing it at all; it was doing
itself, obscurely and spontaneously, by the operation of subliminal
forces of which she knew almost nothing, and to which her personality
bore no more than the relation of a mountain range to unrecordable
volcanic fusions deep down in the earth.

When, after long withdrawal within herself, she changed her position,
sighed, and glanced about her, she had a curious feeling of having
traveled far, of looking back on the old familiar things from a long way
off. The richly wrought silver, the cheerful Minton, the splendidly
toned mahogany, the Goya etchings on the walls, things of no great
value, but long ago acquired, treasured, loved, had suddenly become
useless and irrelevant. She had not lost Tory Hill so much as passed
beyond it--out into a condition where nothing that preceded it could
count, and in which, so far as she was concerned, existence would have
to be a new creation, called afresh out of that which was without form
and void.

She experienced the same sensation, if it _was_ a sensation, when, a
half-hour later, she found herself roaming dreamily rather than
restlessly about the house. She was not anticipating her farewell of it;
it had only ceased to be a background, to have a meaning; it was like
the scenery, painted and set, after the play is done. She herself had
been removed elsewhere, projected into a sphere where the signs and
seasons were so different from anything she had ever known as to afford
no indications--where day did not necessarily induce light, nor night
darkness, nor past experience knowledge. In the confounding of the
perceptive powers and the reeling of the judgment which the new
circumstances produced, she clung to her capacity to survive and
dominate like a staggered man to a stanchion.

In the mean time she was not positively suffering from either shock or
sorrow. From her personal point of view the loss of money was not of
itself an overpowering calamity. It might entail the disruption of
lifelong habits, but she was young enough not to be afraid of that. In
spite of a way of living that might be said to have given her the best
of everything, she had always known that her father's income was a small
one for his position in the world. As a family they had been in the
habit of associating on both sides of the Atlantic, with people whose
revenues were twice and thrice and ten times their own. The obligation
to keep the pace set by their equals had been recognized as a domestic
hardship ever since she could remember, though it was a mitigating
circumstance that in one way or another the money had always been found.
Guion, Maxwell & Guion was a well which, while often threatening to run
dry, had never failed to respond to a sufficiently energetic pumping.
She had known the thought, however--fugitive, speculatory, not dwelt
upon as a real possibility--that a day might come when it would do so no
more.

It was a thought that went as quickly as it came, its only importance
being that it never caused her a shudder. If it sometimes brought matter
for reflection, it was in showing her to herself in a light in which,
she was tolerably sure, she never appeared to anybody else--as the true
child of the line of frugal forebears, of sea-scouring men and
cheese-paring women, who, during nearly two hundred years of thrift, had
put penny to penny to save the Guion competence. Standing in the
cheerful "Colonial" hall which their stinting of themselves had made it
possible to build, and which was still furnished chiefly with the
objects--a settle, a pair of cupboards, a Copley portrait, a few chairs,
some old decorative pottery--they had lived with, it afforded one more
steadying element for her bewilderment to grasp at, to feel herself
their daughter.

There was, indeed, in the very type of her beauty a hint of a carefully
calculated, unwasteful adaptation of means to ends quite in the spirit
of their sparing ways. It was a beauty achieved by nature apparently
with the surest, and yet with the slightest, expenditure of energy--a
beauty of poise, of line, of delicacy, of reserve--with nothing of the
superfluous, and little even of color, beyond a gleam of chrysoprase in
fine, gray eyes and a coppery, metallic luster in hair that otherwise
would have passed as chestnut brown. It was a beauty that came as much
from repose in inaction as from grace in movement, but of which a
noticeable trait was that it required no more to produce it in the way
of effort than in that of artifice. Through the transparent whiteness of
the skin the blue of each clearly articulated vein and the rose of each
hurrying flush counted for its utmost in the general economy of values.

It was in keeping with this restraint that in all her ways, her manners,
her dress, her speech, her pride, there should be a meticulous
simplicity. It was not the simplicity of the hedge-row any more than of
the hothouse; it was rather that of some classic flower, lavender or
crown-imperial, growing from an ancient stock in some dignified,
long-tended garden. It was thus a simplicity closely allied to
sturdiness--the inner sturdiness not inconsistent with an outward
semblance of fragility--the tenacity of strength by which the lavender
scents the summer and the crown-imperial adorns the spring, after the
severest snows.

It was doubtless, this vitality, drawn from deep down in her native
soil, that braced her now, to simply holding fast intuitively and
almost blindly till the first force of the shock should have so spent
itself that the normal working of the faculties might begin again. It
was the something of which she had just spoken to her father--the
something that might be pride but that was not wholly pride, which had
never been taxed nor called on. She could not have defined it in a more
positive degree; but even now, when all was confusion and
disintegration, she was conscious of its being there, an untouched
treasure of resources.

In what it supplied her with, however, there was no answer to the
question that had been silently making itself urgent from the first word
of her father's revelations: What was to happen with regard to her
wedding? It took the practical form of dealing with the mere outward
paraphernalia--the service, the bridesmaids, the guests, the feast.
Would it be reasonable, would it be decent, to carry out rich and
elaborate plans in a ruined house? Further than that she dared not
inquire, though she knew very well there was still a greater question to
be met. When, during the course of the morning, Drusilla Fane came to
see her, Olivia broached it timidly, though the conversation brought her
little in the way of help.

Knowing all she knew through the gossip of servants, Drusilla felt the
necessity of being on her guard. She accepted Olivia's information that
her father had met with losses as so much news, and gave utterance to
sentiments of sympathy and encouragement. Beyond that she could not go.
She was obliged to cast her condolences in the form of bald
generalities, since she could make but a limited use of the name of
Rupert Ashley as a source of comfort. More clearly than any one in their
little group she could see what marriage with Olivia in her new
conditions--the horrible, tragic conditions that would arise if Peter
could do nothing--would mean for him. She weighed her words, therefore,
with an exactness such as she had not displayed since her early days
among the Sussex Rangers, measuring the little more and the little less
as in an apothecary's balances.

"You see," Olivia said, trying to sound her friend's ideas, "from one
point of view I scarcely know him."

"You know him well enough to be in love with him." Drusilla felt that
that committed her to nothing.

"That doesn't imply much--not necessarily, that is. You can be in love
with people and scarcely know them at all. And it often happens that if
you knew them better you wouldn't be in love with them."

"And you know him well enough to be sure that he'll want to do
everything right."

"Oh yes; I'm quite sure of that. I'm only uncertain that--everything
right--would satisfy me."

Drusilla reflected. "I see what you mean. And, of course, you want to
do--everything right--yourself."

Olivia glanced up obliquely under her lashes.

"I see what _you_ mean, too."

"You mustn't see too much." Drusilla spoke hastily. She waited in some
anxiety to see just what significance Olivia had taken from her words;
but when the latter spoke it was to pass on to another point.

"You see, he didn't want to marry an American, in the first place."

"Well, no one forced him into that. That's one thing he did with his
eyes open, at any rate."

"His doing it was a sort of--concession."

Drusilla looked at her with big, indignant eyes.

"Concession to what, for pity's sake?"

"Concession to his own heart, I suppose." Olivia smiled, faintly. "You
see, all other things being equal, he would have preferred to marry one
of his own countrywomen."

"It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. If he'd married one of
his own countrywomen, the other things wouldn't have been equal. So
there you are."

"But the other things aren't equal now. Don't you see? They're changed."

"_You're_ not changed." Drusilla felt these words to be dangerous. It
was a relief to her that Olivia should contradict them promptly.

"Oh yes, I am. I'm changed--in value. With papa's troubles there's a
depreciation in everything we are."

Drusilla repeated these words to her father and mother at table when she
went home to luncheon. "If she feels like that now," she commented,
"what _will_ she say when she knows all?--if she ever has to know it."

"But she hasn't changed," Mrs. Temple argued.

"It doesn't make any difference in _her_."

Drusilla shook her head. "Yes, it does, mother dear. You don't know
anything about it."

"I know enough about it," Mrs. Temple declared, with some asperity, "to
see that she will be the same Olivia Guion after her father has gone to
prison as she was in the days of her happiness. If there's any change,
it will be to make her a better and nobler character. She's just the
type to be--to be perfected through suffering."

"Y-y-es," Drusilla admitted, her head inclined to one side. "That might
be quite true in one way; but it wouldn't help Rupert Ashley to keep his
place in the Sussex Rangers."

"Do you mean to say they'd make him give it up?"

"They wouldn't make him, mother dear. He'd only have to."

"Well, I never did! If that's the British army--"

"The British army is a very complicated institution. It fills a lot of
different functions, and it's a lot of different things. It's one thing
from the point of view of the regiment, and another from that of the War
Office. It's one thing on the official side, and another on the
military, and another on the social. You can't decide anything about it
in an abstract, offhand way. Rupert Ashley might be a capital officer,
and every one might say he'd done the honorable thing in standing by
Olivia; and yet he'd find it impossible to go on as colonel of the
Rangers when his father-in-law was in penal servitude. There it is in a
nutshell. You can't argue about it, because that's the way it is."

Rodney Temple said nothing; but he probably had these words in his mind
when he, too, early in the afternoon, made his way to Tory Hill. Olivia
spoke to him of her father's losses, though her allusions to Colonel
Ashley were necessarily more veiled than they had been with Mrs. Fane.

"The future may be quite different from what I expected. I can't tell
yet for sure. I must see how things--work out."

"That's a very good way, my dear," the old man commended. "It's a large
part of knowledge to know how to leave well enough alone. Nine times out
of ten life works out better by itself than we can make it."

"I know I've got to feel my way," she said, meaning to agree with him.

"I don't see why."

She raised her eyebrows in some surprise. "You don't see--?"

"No, I don't. Why should you feel your way? You're not blind."

"I feel my way because I don't see it."

"Oh yes, you do--all you need to see."

"But I don't see any. I assure you it's all confusion."

"Not a bit, my dear. It's as plain as a pikestaff--for the next step."

"I don't know what you mean by the next step."

"I suppose the next step would be--well, let us say what you've got to
do to-day. That's about as much ground as any one can cover with a
stride. You see that, don't you? You've got to eat your dinner, and go
to bed. That's all you've got to settle for the moment."

Her lips relaxed in a pale smile. "I'm afraid I must look a little
farther ahead than that."

"What for? What good will it do? You won't see anything straight. It's
no use trying to see daylight two hours before dawn. People are foolish
enough sometimes to make the attempt, but they only strain their
eyesight. For every step you've got to take there'll be something to
show you the line to follow."

"What?" She asked the question chiefly for the sake of humoring him. She
was not susceptible to this kind of comfort, nor did she feel the need
of it.

"W-well," the old man answered, slowly, "it isn't easy to tell you in
any language you'd understand."

"I can understand plain English, if that would do."

"You can make it do, but it doesn't do very well. It's really one of
those things that require what the primitive Christians called an
unknown tongue. Since we haven't got that as a means of communication--"
He broke off, stroking his long beard with a big handsome hand, but
presently began again.

"Some people call it a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by
night. Some people have described it by other figures of speech. The
description isn't of importance--it's the _Thing_."

She waited a minute, before saying in a tone that had some awe in it, as
well as some impatience: "Oh, but I've never seen anything like that. I
never expect to."

"That's a pity; because it's there."

"There? Where?"

"Just where one would look for it--if one looked at all. When it moves,"
he went on, his hand suiting the action to the word, on a level with his
eyes, "when it moves, you follow it, and when it rests, you wait. It's
possible--I don't know--I merely throw out the suggestion--no one can
really _know_ but yourself, because no one but yourself can see it--but
it's possible that at this moment--for you--it's standing still."

"I don't know what I gain either by its moving or its standing still, so
long as I don't see it."

"No, neither do I," he assented, promptly.

"Well, then?" she questioned.

"Shall I tell you a little story?" He smiled at her behind his stringy,
sandy beard, while his kind old eyes blinked wistfully.

"If you like. I shall be happy to hear it." She was not enthusiastic.
She was too deeply engrossed with pressing, practical questions to find
his mysticism greatly to the point.

He took a turn around the drawing-room before beginning, stopping to
caress the glaze of one of the K'ang-hsi vases on the mantelpiece, while
he arranged his thoughts.

"There was once a little people," he began, turning round to where she
sat in the corner of a sofa, her hands clasped in her lap--"there was
once a little people--a mere handful, who afterward became a race--who
saw the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, and
followed it. That is to say, some of them certainly saw it, enough of
them to lead the others on. For a generation or two they were little
more than a band of nomads; but at last they came to a land where they
fought and conquered and settled down."

"Yes? I seem to have heard of them. Please go on."

"It was a little land, rather curiously situated between the Orient and
the West, between the desert and the sea. It had great advantages both
for seclusion within itself and communication with the world outside. If
a divine power had wanted to nourish a tender shoot, till it grew strong
enough to ripen seed that would blow readily into every corner of the
globe, it probably couldn't have done better than to have planted it
just there."

She nodded, to show that she followed him.

"But this little land had also the dangers attendant on its advantages.
To the north of it there developed a great power; to the south of it
another. Each turned greedy eyes on the little buffer state. And the
little buffer state began to be very wise and politic and energetic. It
said, 'If we don't begin to take active measures, the Assyrian, or the
Egyptian, whoever gets here first, will eat us up. But if we buy off the
one, he will protect us against the other.'"

"That seems reasonable."

"Yes; quite reasonable: too reasonable. They forgot that a power that
could lead them by fire and cloud could protect them even against
conscript troops and modern methods of fighting. They forgot that if so
much trouble had been taken to put them where they were, it was not
that--assuming that they behaved themselves--it was not that they might
be easily rooted out. Instead of having confidence within they looked
for an ally from without, and chose Egypt. Very clever; very diplomatic.
There was only one criticism to be made on the course taken--that it was
all wrong. There was a man on the spot to tell them so--one of those
fellows whom we should call pessimists if we hadn't been taught to speak
of them as prophets. 'You are carrying your riches,' he cried to them,
'on the shoulders of young asses, and your treasures on the bunches of
camels, to a people that shall not profit you. For the Egyptians shall
help in vain, and to no purpose. Your strength is--_to sit still_!'" As
he stood looking down at her his kindly eyes blinked for a minute
longer, before he added, "Do you see the point?"

She smiled and nodded. "Yes. It isn't very obscure. Otherwise expressed
it might be, When in doubt, do nothing."

"Exactly; do nothing--till the pillar of cloud begins to move."

Out of the old man's parable she extracted just one hint that she
considered useful. In the letter which she proceeded to write Rupert
Ashley as soon as she was alone, a letter that would meet him on his
arrival in New York, she gave a statement of such facts as had come to
her knowledge, but abstained from comments of her own, and from
suggestions. She had intended to make both. She had thought it at first
her duty to take the initiative in pointing out the gulf of difficulties
that had suddenly opened up between her lover and herself. It occurred
to her now that she might possibly discern the leading of the pillar of
cloud from self-betrayal on his part. She would note carefully his acts,
his words, the expressions of his face. She had little doubt of being
able to read in them some indication of her duty. This in itself was a
relief. It was like being able to learn a language instead of having to
invent one. Nevertheless, as she finished her letter she was impelled to
add:

"We have asked some three hundred people to the church for the 28th.
Many of them will not be in town, as the season is still so early; but I
think it wisest to withdraw all invitations without consulting you
further. This will leave us free to do as we think best after you
arrive. We can then talk over everything from the beginning."

With the hint thus conveyed she felt her letter to be discreetly worded.
By the time she had slipped down the driveway to the box at the gate and
posted it with her own hands her father had returned.

She had ordered tea in the little oval sitting-room they used when quite
alone, and told the maid to say she was not receiving if anybody called.
She knew her father would be tired, but she hoped that if they were
undisturbed he would talk to her of his affairs. There was so much in
them that was mysterious to her. Notwithstanding her partial recovery
from the shock of the morning, she still felt herself transported to a
world in which the needs were new to her, and the chain of cause and
effect had a bewildering inconsequence. For this reason it seemed to her
quite in the order of things--the curiously inverted order now
established, in which one thing was as likely as another--that her
father should stretch himself in a comfortable arm-chair and say nothing
at all till after he had finished his second cup of tea. Even then he
might not have spoken if her own patience had held out.

"So you didn't go away, after all," she felt it safe to observe.

"No, I didn't."

"Sha'n't you _have_ to go?"

There was an instant's hesitation.

"Perhaps not. In fact--I may almost definitely say--_not_. I should like
another cup of tea."

"That makes three, papa. Won't it keep you awake?"

"Nothing will keep me awake to-night."

The tone caused her to look at him more closely as she took the cup he
handed back to her. She noticed that his eyes glittered and that in
either cheek, above the line of the beard, there was a hectic spot. She
adjusted the spirit-lamp, and, lifting the cover of the kettle, looked
inside.

"Has anything happened?" she asked, doing her best to give the question
a casual intonation.

"A great deal has happened." He allowed that statement to sink in
before continuing. "I think"--he paused long--"I think I'm going to get
the money."

She held herself well in hand, though at the words the old familiar
landmarks of her former world seemed to rise again, rosily, mistily,
like the walls of Troy to the sound of Apollo's lute. She looked into
the kettle again to see if the water was yet boiling, taking longer than
necessary to peer into the quiet depth.

"I'm so glad." She spoke as if he had told her he had shaken hands with
an old friend. "I thought you would."

"Ah, but you never thought of anything like this."

"I knew it would be something pretty good. With your name, there wasn't
the slightest doubt of it."

Had he been a wise man he would have let it go at that. He was not,
however, a wise man. The shallow, brimming reservoir of his nature was
of the kind that spills over at a splash.

"The most extraordinary thing has happened," he went on. "A man came to
my office to-day and offered to lend me--no, not to lend--practically to
_give_ me--enough money to pull me through."

She held a lump of sugar poised above his cup with the sugar-tongs. Her
astonishment was so great that she kept it there. The walls of the city
which just now had seemed to be rising magically faded away again,
leaving the same unbounded vacancy into which she had been looking out
all day.

"What do you mean by--practically to give you?"

"The man said lend. But my name is good for even more than you supposed,
since he knows, and I know, that I can offer him no security."

"How can he tell, then, that you'll ever pay it back?"

"He can't tell. That's just it."

"And can you tell?" She let the lump of sugar fall with a circle of tiny
eddies into the cup of tea.

"I can tell--up to a point." His tone indicated some abatement of
enthusiasm.

"Up to what point?"

"Up to the point that I'll pay it back--if I can. That's all he asks. As
a matter of fact, he doesn't seem to care."

She handed him his cup. "Isn't that a very queer way to lend money?"

"Of course it's queer. That's why I'm telling you. That's what makes it
so remarkable--such a--tribute--to me, I dare say that sounds fatuous,
but--"

"It doesn't sound fatuous so much as--"

"So much as what?"

The distress gathering in her eyes prepared him for her next words
before she uttered them.

"Papa, I shouldn't think you'd take it."

He stared at her dully. Her perspicacity disconcerted him. He had
expected to bolster up the ruins of his honor by her delighted
acquiescence. He had not known till now how much he had been counting on
the justification of her relief. It was a proof, however, of the degree
to which his own initiative had failed him that he cowered before her
judgment, with little or no protest.

"I haven't said I'd take it--positively."

"Naturally. Of course you haven't."

He dabbled the spoon uneasily in his tea, looking downcast. "I don't
quite see that," he objected, trying to rally his pluck, "why it should
be--naturally."

"Oh, don't you? To me it's self-evident. We may have lost money, but
we're still not--recipients of alms."

"This wasn't alms. It was four hundred and fifty thousand dollars."

She was plainly awe-struck. "That's a great deal; but I supposed it
would be something large. And yet the magnitude of the sum only makes it
the more impossible to accept."

"Y-es; of course--if you look at it in that way." He put back his cup on
the table untasted.

"Surely it's the only way to look at it? Aren't you going to drink your
tea?"

"No, I think not. I've had enough. I've--I've had enough--of
everything."

He sank back wearily into the depths of his arm-chair. The glitter had
passed from his eyes; he looked ill. He had clearly not enough courage
to make a stand for what he wanted. She could see how cruelly he was
disappointed. After all, he might have accepted the money and told her
nothing about it! He had taken her into his confidence because of that
need of expansion that had often led him to "give away" what a more
crafty man would have kept to himself. She was profiting by his
indiscretion to make what was already so hard for him still harder.
Sipping her tea slowly, she turned the subject over and over in her
mind, seeking some ground on which to agree with him.

She did this the more conscientiously, since she had often reproached
herself with a fixity of principle that might with some show of reason
be called too inflexible. Between right and wrong other people,
especially the people of her "world," were able to see an infinitude of
shadings she had never been able to distinguish. She half accepted the
criticism often made of her in Paris and London that her Puritan
inheritance had given an inartistic rigidity to her moral prospect. It
inclined her to see the paths of life as ruled and numbered like the
checker-board plan of an American city, instead of twisting and winding,
quaintly and picturesquely, with round-about evasions and astonishing
short-cuts, amusing to explore, whether for the finding or the losing of
the way, as in any of the capitals long trodden by the feet of men.
Between the straight, broad avenues of conduct, well lighted and well
defined, there lay apparently whole regions of byways, in which those
who could not easily do right could wander vaguely, without precisely
doing wrong, following a line that might be termed permissible. Into
this tortuous maze her spirit now tried to penetrate, as occasionally,
to visit some historic monument, she had plunged into the slums of a
medieval town.

It was an exercise that brought her nothing but a feeling of
bewilderment. Having no sense of locality for this kind of labyrinth,
she could only turn round and round confusedly. All she could do, when
from the drooping of her father's lids she feared he was falling off to
sleep, leaving the question unsettled, was to say, helplessly:

"I suppose you'll be sorry now for having told me."

He lifted his long lashes, that were like a girl's, and looked at her.
The minutes that had passed had altered his expression. There was again
a sparkle of resolve, perhaps of relief, in his glance. Without changing
his position, he spoke drowsily, and yet reassuringly, like a man with a
large and easy grasp of the situation. She was not sure whether it was a
renewal of confidence on his part or a bit of acting.

"No, dear, no. I wanted to get your point of view. It's always
interesting to me. I see your objections--of course. I may say that I
even shared some of them--till--"

She allowed him a minute in which to resume, but, as he kept silence,
she ventured to ask:

"Does that mean that you don't share them now?"

"I see what there is to be said--all round. It isn't to be expected,
dear, that you, as a woman, not used to business--"

"Oh, but I didn't understand that this _was_ business. That's just the
point. To borrow money might be business--to borrow it on security, you
know, or whatever else is the usual way--but not to take it as a
present."

He jerked himself up into a forward posture. When he replied to her, it
was with didactic, explanatory irritation.

"When I said that, I was legitimately using language that might be
called exaggerated. Hyperbole is, I believe, the term grammarians use
for it. I didn't expect you, dear, to take me up so literally. It isn't
like you. You generally have more imagination. As a matter of fact,
Davenant's offer was that of a loan--"

"Oh! So it was--that man?"

"Yes; it was he. He expressly spoke of it as _a loan_. I myself
interpreted it as a gift simply to emphasize its extraordinary
generosity. I thought you'd appreciate that. Do you see?"

"Perfectly, papa; and it's the extraordinary generosity that seems to me
just what makes it impossible. Why should Mr. Davenant be generous to
us? What does he expect to gain?"

"I had that out with him. He said he didn't expect to gain anything."

"And you believed him?"

"Partly; though I suppose he has something up his sleeve. It wasn't my
policy to question him too closely about that. It's not altogether my
first concern. I need the money."

"But you don't need the money--in that way, papa?"

"I need it in any way. If Davenant will let me have it--especially on
such terms--I've no choice but to take it."

"Oh, don't, papa. I'm sure it isn't right. I--I don't like him."

"Pff! What's that got to do with it? This is business."

"No, papa. It's not business. It's a great deal more--or a great deal
less--I don't know which."

"You don't know anything about it at all, dear. You may take that from
me. This is a man's affair. You really _must_ leave it to me to deal
with it." Once more he fell back into the depth of his arm-chair and
closed his eyes. "If you don't mind, I think I should like a little nap.
What have you got so especially against Davenant, anyhow?"

"I've nothing against him--except that I've never liked him."

"What do you know about him? When did you ever see him?"

"I _haven't_ seen him for years--not since Drusilla used to bring him to
dances, when we were young girls. She didn't like it particularly, but
she had to do it because he was her father's ward and had gone to live
with them. He was uncouth--aggressive. Wasn't he a foundling, or a
street Arab, or something like that? He certainly seemed so. He wasn't a
bit--civilized. And once he--he said something--he almost insulted me.
You wouldn't take his money now, papa?"

There was no answer. He breathed gently. She spoke more forcibly.

"Papa, you wouldn't let a stranger pay your debts?"

He continued to breathe gently, his eyes closed, the long black lashes
curling on his cheek.

"Papa, darling," she cried, "I'll help you. I'll take everything on
myself. I'll find a way--somehow. Only, _don't_ do this."

He stirred, and murmured sleepily.

"You attend to your wedding, dear. That'll be quite enough for you to
look after."

"But I can't have a wedding if Mr. Davenant has to pay for it. Don't you
see? I can't be married at all."

When he made no response to this shot, she understood finally that he
meant to let the subject drop.




VII


It was in the nature of a relief to Olivia Guion when, on the following
day, her father was too ill to go to his office. A cold, caused by the
exposure of two nights previous, and accompanied by a rising
temperature, kept him confined to his room, though not to bed. The
occurrence, by maintaining the situation where it was, rendered it
impossible to take any irretrievable step that day. This was so much
gain.

She had slept little; she had passed most of the night in active and, as
it seemed to her, lucid thinking. Among the points clearest to her was
the degree to which she herself was involved in the present business. In
a measure, the transfer of a large sum of money from Peter Davenant to
her father would be an incident more vital to her than to any one else,
since she more than any one else must inherit its moral effects. While
she was at a loss to see what the man could claim from them in return
for his generosity, she was convinced that his exactions would be not
unconnected with herself. If, on the other hand, he demanded nothing,
then the lifelong obligation in the way of gratitude that must thus be
imposed on her would be the most intolerable thing of all. Better any
privation than the incurring of such a debt--a debt that would cover
everything she was or could become. Its magnitude would fill her
horizon; she must live henceforth in the world it made, her very
personality would turn into a thing of confused origin, sprung, it was
true, from Henry and Carlotta Guion in the first place, but taking a
second lease of life from the man whose beneficence started her afresh.
She would date back to him, as barbarous women date to their marriage or
Mohammedans to the Flight. It was a relation she could not have endured
toward a man even if she loved him; still less was it sufferable with
one whom she had always regarded with an indefinable disdain, when she
had not ignored him. The very possibility that he might purchase a hold
on her inspired a frantic feeling, like that of the ermine at pollution.

Throughout the morning she was obliged to conceal from her father this
intense opposition--or, at least to refrain from speaking of it. When
she made the attempt he grew so feverish that the doctor advised the
postponement of distressing topics till he should be better able to
discuss them. She could only make him as comfortable as might be,
pondering while she covered him up in the chaise-longue, putting his
books and his cigars within easy reach, how she could best convert him
to her point of view. It was inconceivable to her that he would persist
in the scheme when he realized how it would affect her.

She had gone down to the small oval sitting-room commanding the
driveway, thinking it probable that Drusilla Fane might come to see her.
Watching for her approach, she threw open the French window set in the
rounded end of the room and leading out to the Corinthian-columned
portico that adorned what had once been the garden side of the house.
There was no garden now, only a stretch of elm-shaded lawn, with a few
dahlias and zinnias making gorgeous clusters against the already
gorgeous autumn-tinted shrubbery. On the wall of a neighboring brick
house, Virginia creeper and ampelopsis added fuel to the fire of
surrounding color, while a maple in the middle distance blazed with all
the hues that might have flamed in Moses's burning bush. It was one of
those days of the American autumn when the air is shot with gold, when
there is gold in the light, gold on the foliage, gold on the grass, gold
on all surfaces, gold in all shadows, and a gold sheen in the sky
itself. Red gold like a rich lacquer overlay the trunks of the
occasional pines, and pale-yellow gold, beaten and thin, shimmered along
the pendulous garlands of the American elms, where they caught the sun.
It was a windless morning and a silent one; the sound of a hammer or of
a motorist's horn, coming up from the slope of splendid woodland that
was really the town, accentuated rather than disturbed the immediate
stillness.

To Olivia Guion this quiet ecstasy of nature was uplifting. Its rich,
rejoicing quality restored as by a tonic her habitual confidence in her
ability to carry the strongholds of life with a high and graceful hand.
Difficulties that had been paramount, overpowering, fell all at once
into perspective, becoming heights to be scaled rather than barriers
defying passage. For the first time in the twenty-four hours since the
previous morning's revelations, she thought of her lover as bringing
comfort rather than as creating complications.

Up to this minute he had seemed to withdraw from her, to elude her. As a
matter of fact, though she spoke of him rarely and always with a
purposely prosaic touch, he was so romantic a figure in her dreams that
the approach of the sordid and the ugly had dispelled his image. It was
quite true, as she had said to Drusilla Fane, that from one point of
view she didn't know him very well. She might have said that she didn't
know him at all on any of those planes where rents and the price of beef
are factors. He had come into her life with much the same sort of appeal
as the wandering knight of the days of chivalry made to the damsel in
the family fortress. Up to his appearing she had thought herself too
sophisticated and too old to be caught by this kind of fancy, especially
as it was not the first time she had been exposed to it. In the person
of Rupert Ashley, however, it presented itself with the requisite
limitations and accompaniments. He was neither so young nor so rich nor
of such high rank as to bring a disproportionate element into their
romance, while at the same time he had all the endowments of looks,
birth, and legendary courage that the heroine craves in the hero. When
he was not actually under her eyes, her imagination embodied him most
easily in the _svelte_ elegance of the King Arthur beside Maximilian's
tomb at Innspruck.

Their acquaintance had been brief, but illuminating--one of those
friendships that can afford to transcend the knowledge of mere outward
personal facts to leap to the things of the heart and the spirit. It was
one of the commonplaces of their intimate speech together that they
"seemed to have known each other always"; but now that it was necessary
for her to possess some practical measure of his character, she saw,
with a sinking of the heart, that they had never passed beyond the stage
of the poetic and pictorial.

Speculating as to what he would say when he received her letter telling
of her father's misfortunes, she was obliged to confess that she "had
not the remotest idea." Matters of this sort belonged to a world on
which they had deliberately turned their backs. That is to say, she had
turned her back on it deliberately, though by training knowing its
importance, fearing that to him it would seem mundane, inappropriate,
American. This course had been well enough during the period of a
high-bred courtship, almost too fastidiously disdainful of the
commonplace; but now that the Fairy Princess had become a beggar-maid,
while Prince Charming was Prince Charming still, it was natural that the
former should recognize its insufficiency. She had recognized it fully
yesterday; but this morning, in the optimistic brightness of the golden
atmosphere, romance came suddenly to life again and confidence grew
strong. Drusilla had said that she, Olivia, knew him well enough to be
sure that he would want to do--everything right. They would do
everything right--together. They would save her father whom she loved so
tenderly, from making rash mistakes, and--who knew?--find a way,
perhaps, to rescue him in his troubles and shelter his old age.

She was so sure of herself to-day, and so nearly sure of Ashley, that
even the shock of seeing Peter Davenant coming up the driveway, between
the clumps of shrubbery, brought her no dismay. She was quick in reading
the situation. It was after eleven o'clock; he had had time to go to
Boston, and, learning that her father was not at his office, had come to
seek him at home.

She made her arrangements promptly. Withdrawing from the window before
he could see her, she bade the maid say that, Mr. Guion being ill, Miss
Guion would be glad to see Mr. Davenant, if he would have the kindness
to come in. To give an air of greater naturalness to the
_mise-en-scène_, she took a bit of embroidery from her work-basket, and
began to stitch at it, seating herself near the open window. She was not
without a slight, half-amused sense of lying in ambush, as if some
Biblical voice were saying to her, "Up! for the Lord hath delivered
thine enemy into thine hand."

       *       *       *       *       *

"My father isn't well," she explained to Davenant, when she had shaken
hands with him and begged him to sit down. "I dare say he may not be
able to go out for two or three days to come."

"So they told me at his office. I was sorry to hear it."

"You've been to his office, then? He told me you were there yesterday.
That's partly the reason why I've ventured to ask you to come in."

She went on with her stitching, turning the canvas first on one side and
then on the other, sticking the needle in with very precise care. He
fancied she was waiting for him to "give himself away" by saying
something, no matter what. Having, however, a talent for silence without
embarrassment, he made use of it, knowing that by means of it he could
force her to resume.

He was not at ease; he was not without misgiving. It had been far from
his expectation to see her on this errand, or, for the matter of that,
on any errand at all. It had never occurred to him that Guion could
speak to her of a transaction so private, so secret, as that proposed
between them. Since, then, his partner in the undertaking had been
foolish, Davenant felt the necessity on his side of being doubly
discreet. Moreover, he was intuitive enough to feel her antipathy toward
him on purely general grounds. "I'm not her sort," was the summing-up of
her sentiments he made for himself. He could not wholly see why he
excited her dislike since, beyond a moment of idiotic presumption long
ago, he had never done her any harm.

He fancied that his personal appearance, as much as anything, was
displeasing to her fastidiousness. He was so big, so awkward; his hands
and feet were so clumsy. A little more and he would have been ungainly;
perhaps she considered him ungainly as it was. He had tried to negative
his defects by spending a great deal of money on his clothes and being
as particular as a girl about his nails; but he felt that with all his
efforts he was but a bumpkin compared with certain other men--Rodney
Temple, for example--who never took any pains at all. Looking at her
now, her pure, exquisite profile bent over her piece of work, while the
sun struck coppery gleams from her masses of brown hair, he felt as he
had often felt in rooms filled with fragile specimens of
art--flower-like cups of ancient glass, dainty groups in Meissen, mystic
lovelinesses wrought in amber, ivory, or jade--as if his big, gross
personality ought to shrink into itself and he should walk on tiptoe.

"I understand from my father," she said, when she found herself obliged
to break the silence, "that you've offered to help him in his
difficulties. I couldn't let the occasion pass without telling you how
much I appreciate your generosity."

She spoke without looking up; words and tone were gently courteous, but
they affected him like an April zephyr, that ought to bring the balm of
spring, and yet has the chill of ice in it.

"Haven't you noticed," he said, slowly, choosing his words with care,
"that generosity consists largely in the point of view of the other
party? You may give away an old cloak, for the sake of getting rid of
it; but the person who receives it thinks you kind."

"I see that," she admitted, going on with her work, "and yet there are
people to whom I shouldn't offer an old cloak, even if I had one to give
away."

He colored promptly. "You mean that if they needed anything you'd offer
them the best you had."

"I wonder if you'd understand that I'm not speaking ungraciously if I
said that--I shouldn't offer them anything at all?"

He put up his hand and stroked his long, fair mustache. It was the sort
of rebuke to which he was sensitive. It seemed to relegate him to
another land, another world, another species of being from those to
which she belonged. It was a second or two before he could decide what
to say. "No, Miss Guion," he answered then; "I don't understand that
point of view."

"I'm sorry. I hoped you would."

"Why?"

She lifted her clear gray eyes on him for the briefest possible look.
"Need I explain?"

The question gave him an advantage he was quick to seize. "Not at all,
Miss Guion. You've a right to your own judgments. I don't ask to know
them."

"But I think you ought. When you enter into what is distinctly our
private family affair, I've a right to give my opinion."

"You don't think I question that?"

"I'm afraid I do. I imagine you're capable of carrying your point,
regardless of what I feel."

"But I've no point to carry. I find Mr. Guion wanting to borrow a sum of
money that I'm prepared to lend. It's a common situation in business."

"Ah, but this is not business. It's charity."

"Did Mr. Guion tell you so?"

"He did. He told me all about it. My father has no secrets from me."

"Did he use the word--charity?"

"Almost. He said you offered him a loan, but that it really was a gift."

His first impulse was to repudiate this point of view, but a minute's
reflection decided him in favor of plain speaking. "Well," he said,
slowly, "suppose it _was_ a gift. Would there be any harm in it?"

"There wouldn't be any harm, perhaps; there would only be
an--impossibility." She worked very busily, and spoke in a low voice,
without looking up. "A gift implies two conditions--on the one side the
right to offer, and on the other the freedom to take."

"But I should say that those conditions existed--between Mr. Guion and
me."

"But not between you and me. Don't you see? That's the point. To any
such transaction as this I have to be, in many ways, the most important
party."

Again he was tempted to reject this interpretation; but, once more, on
second thought, he allowed it to go uncontested. When he spoke it was to
pass to another order of question.

"I wonder how much you know?"

"About my father's affairs? I know everything."

"Everything?"

"Yes; everything. He told me yesterday. I didn't expect him to come home
last night at all; but he came--and told me what you had proposed."

"You understood, then," Davenant stammered, "that he might have
to--to--go away?"

"Oh, perfectly."

"And aren't you very much appalled?"

The question was wrung from him by sheer astonishment. That she should
sit calmly embroidering a sofa-cushion, with this knowledge in her
heart, with this possibility hanging over her, seemed to him to pass the
limits of the human. He knew there were heroic women; but he had not
supposed that with all their heroism they carried themselves with such
sang-froid. Before replying she took time to search in her work-basket
for another skein of silk.

"Appalled is scarcely the word. Of course, it was a blow to me; but I
hope I know how to take a blow without flinching."

"Oh, but one like this--"

"We're able to bear it. What makes you think we can't? If we didn't try,
we should probably involve ourselves in worse."

"But how could there be worse?"

"That's what I don't know. You see, when my father told me of your kind
offer, he didn't tell me what you wanted."

"Did he say I wanted anything?"

"He said you hadn't asked for anything. That's what leaves us so much in
the dark."

"Isn't it conceivable--" he began, with a slightly puzzled air.

"Not that it matters," she interrupted, hurriedly. "Of course, if we had
anything with which to compensate you--anything adequate, that is--I
don't say that we shouldn't consider seriously the suggestion you were
good enough to make. But we haven't. As I understand it, we haven't
anything at all. That settles the question definitely. I hope you see."

"Isn't it conceivable," he persisted, "that a man might like to do a
thing, once in a way, without--"

"Without asking for an equivalent in return? Possibly. But in this case
it would only make it harder for me."

"How so?"

"By putting me under an overwhelming obligation to a total stranger--an
obligation that I couldn't bear, while still less could I do away with
it."

"I don't see," he reasoned, "that you'd be under a greater obligation to
me in that case than you are to others already."

"At present," she corrected, "we're not under an obligation to any one.
My father and I are contending with circumstances; we're not asking
favors of individuals. I know we owe money--a great deal of money--to a
good many people--"

"Who are total strangers, just like me."

"Not total strangers just like you--but total strangers whom I don't
know, and don't know anything about, and who become impersonal from
their very numbers."

"But you know Mrs. Rodman and Mrs. Clay. They're not impersonal."

All he saw for the instant was that she arrested her needle half-way
through the stitch. She sat perfectly still, her head bent, her fingers
rigid, as she might have sat in trying to catch some sudden, distant
sound. It was only in thinking it over afterward that he realized what
she must have lived through in the seconds before she spoke.

"Does my father owe money to _them_?"

The hint of dismay was so faint that it might have eluded any ear but
one rendered sharp by suspicion. Davenant felt the blood rushing to his
temples and a singing in his head. "My God, she didn't know!" he cried,
inwardly. The urgency of retrieving his mistake kept him calm and cool,
prompting him to reply with assumed indifference.

"I really can't say anything about it. I suppose they would be among the
creditors--as a matter of course."

For the first time she let her clear, grave eyes rest fully on him. They
were quiet eyes, with exquisitely finished lids and lashes. In his
imagination their depth of what seemed like devotional reverie
contributed more than anything else to her air of separation and
remoteness.

"Isn't it very serious--when there's anything wrong with estates?"

He answered readily, still forcing a tone of careless matter-of-fact.

"Of course it's serious. Everything is serious in business. Your
father's affairs are just where they can be settled--now. But if we put
it off any longer it might not be so easy. Men often have to take charge
of one another's affairs--and straighten them out--and advance one
another money--and all that--in business."

She looked away from him again, absently. She appeared not to be
listening. There was something in her manner that advised him of the
uselessness of saying anything more in that vein. After a while she
folded her work, smoothing it carefully across her knee. The only sign
she gave of being unusually moved was in rising from her chair and going
to the open window, where she stood with her back to him, apparently
watching the dartings from point to point of a sharp-eyed gray squirrel.

Rising as she did, he stood waiting for her to turn and say something
else. Now that the truth was dawning on her, it seemed to him as well to
allow it to grow clear. It would show her the futility of further
opposition. He would have been glad to keep her ignorant; he regretted
the error into which she herself unwittingly had led him; but, since it
had been committed, it would not be wholly a disaster if it summoned her
to yield.

Having come to this conclusion, he had time to make another observation
while she still stood with her back to him. It was to consider himself
fortunate in having ceased to be in love with her. In view of all the
circumstances, it was a great thing to have passed through that phase
and come out of it. He had read somewhere that a man is never twice in
love with the same person. If that were so, he could fairly believe
himself immune, as after a certain kind of malady. If it were not for
this he would have found in her hostility to his efforts and her
repugnance to his person a temptation--a temptation to which he was
specially liable in regard to living things--to feel that it was his
right to curb the spirit and tame the rebellion of whatever was restive
to his control. There was something in this haughty, high-strung
creature, poising herself in silence to stand upright in the face of
fate, that would have called forth his impulse to dominate her will, to
subdue her lips to his own, if he had really cared. Fortunately, he
didn't care, and so could seek her welfare with detachment.

Turning slowly, she stood grasping the back of the chair from which she
had risen. He always remembered afterward that it was a chair of which
the flowing curves and rich interlacings of design contrasted with her
subtly emphasized simplicity. He had once had the morbid curiosity to
watch, in an English law-court, the face and attitude of a woman--a
surgeon's wife--standing in the dock to be sentenced to death. It seemed
to him now that Olivia Guion stood like her--with the same resoluteness,
not so much desperate as slightly dazed.

"Wasn't it for something of that kind--something wrong with
estates--that Jack Berrington was sent to prison?"

The question took him unawares. "I--I don't remember."

"I do. I should think you would. The trial was in all the papers. It was
the Gray estate. He was Mrs. Gray's trustee. He ruined the whole Gray
family."

"Possibly." He did his best to speak airily. "In the matter of estates
there are all sorts of hitches that can happen. Some are worse than
others, of course--"

"I've seen his wife, Ada Berrington, once or twice, when I've been in
Paris. She lives there, waiting for him to come out of Singville. She
avoids her old friends when she can--but I've seen her."

"I think I remember hearing about them," he said, for the sake of saying
something; "but--"

"I should like to go and talk with my father. Would you mind waiting?"

She made as though she would pass him, but he managed to bar her way.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Miss Guion. If he's not well it'll
only upset him. Why not let everything be just as it is? You won't
regret it a year hence--believe me. In nine things out of ten you'd know
better than I; but this is the tenth thing, in which I know better than
you. Why not trust me--and let me have a free hand?"

"I'm afraid I must go to my father. If you'll be kind enough to wait,
I'll come back and tell you what he says. Then we shall know. Will you
please let me pass?"

He moved to one side. He thought again of the woman in the English
law-court. It was like this that she walked from the dock--erect,
unflinching, graceful, with eyes fixed straight before her, as though
she saw something in the air.

He watched her cross the hall to the foot of the staircase. There she
paused pensively. In a minute or two she came back to the sitting-room
door.

"If it should be like--like Jack Berrington," she said, from the
threshold, with a kind of concentrated quiet in her manner, "then--what
you suggested--would be more out of the question than ever."

"I don't see that," he returned, adopting her own tone. "I should think
it would be just the other way."

She shook her head.

"There are a lot of points of view that you haven't seen yet," he
persisted. "I could put some of them before you if you'd give me time."

"It would be no use doing that. I should never believe anything but that
we, my father and I, should bear the responsibilities of our own acts."

"You'll think differently," he began, "when you've looked at the thing
all round; and then--"

But before he could complete his sentence she had gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

Having seen her go up-stairs, he waited in some uncertainty. When
fifteen or twenty minutes had gone by and she did not return, he decided
to wait no longer. Picking up his hat and stick from the chair on which
he had laid them, he went out by the French window, making his way to
the gate across the lawn.




VIII


Finding the door of her father's room ajar, Miss Guion pushed it open
and went in.

Wearing a richly quilted dressing-gown, with cuffs and rolled collar of
lavender silk, he lay asleep in the chaise-longue, a tan-colored rug
across his feet. On a table at his left stood a silver box containing
cigars, a silver ash-tray, a silver match-box, and a small silver lamp
burning with a tiny flame. Each piece was engraved with his initials and
a coat-of-arms. On his right there was an adjustable reading-stand,
holding an open copy of a recent English review. One hand, adorned with
an elaborately emblazoned seal-ring, hung heavily toward the floor; a
cigar that had gone out was still between the fingers. His head, resting
on a cushion of violet brocade, had fallen slightly to one side.

She sat down beside him, to wait till he woke up. It was a large room,
with white doors and wainscoting. Above the woodwork it was papered in
pale yellow. On the walls there were water-colors, prints, photographs,
and painted porcelain plaques. Over the bed, for decorative rather than
devotional purposes, hung an old French ivory crucifix, while lower
down was a silver holy-water stoup of Venetian make, that was oftenest
used for matches. It had been the late Mrs. Guion's room, and expressed
her taste. It contained too many ornaments, too many knickknacks, too
many mirrors, too many wardrobes, too many easy-chairs, too much
embossed silver on the dressing-table, too much old porcelain, wherever
there was a place for it. Everything was costly, from the lace coverlet
on the bed to the Persian rugs on the floor.

Olivia looked vaguely about the room, as on an apartment she had never
before seen. She found herself speculating as to the amount these
elaborate furnishings would fetch if sold. She recalled the fact,
forgotten till now, that when the Berringtons' belongings, purchased
with reckless extravagance, passed under the hammer, they had gone for a
song. She made the same forecast regarding the contents of Tory Hill.
Much money had been spent on them, but, with the exception perhaps of
some of the old portraits, there was little of real intrinsic value. She
made the reflection coldly, drearily, as bearing on things that had no
connection with herself.

Her eyes traveled back to her father. With the muscles of the face
relaxed in sleep, he looked old and jaded. The mustache, which had not
been waxed or curled that day, sagged at the corners, the mouth sagging
under it. Above the line of the beard the skin was mottled and puffy.
The lashes rested on his cheeks with the luxuriance of a girl's, and the
splendid eyebrows had all their fullness; but the lids twitched and
quivered like those of a child that has fallen asleep during a fit of
weeping.

It was this twitching that softened her, that compelled her to judge him
from the most merciful point of view. There was something piteous about
him, something that silenced reproaches, that disarmed severity. She had
come up-stairs staggered, incredulous--incredulous and yet
convinced--outraged, terrified; but now the appeal of that fagged face
and those quivering lids was too strong for her. It wrought in her not
so much sympathy as comprehension, an understanding of him such as she
had never before arrived at. In his capacity of father she had loved him
unrestrainedly, but admired him with reserves. It was impossible not to
love a parent so handsome, so genial, so kind, so generally admired; it
was equally impossible not to criticize, however gently, a man with such
a love of luxury, of unwarranted princeliness, and of florid display.
She was indulgent to his tastes in the degree to which a new and
enlightened generation can be tolerant of the errors of that preceding
it, but she could not ignore the fact that the value he set on
things--in morals, society, or art--depended on their power to strike
the eye. She had smiled at that, as at something which, after all, was
harmless. She had smiled, too, when he offered to himself--and to her
also, it had to be admitted--the best of whatever could be had, since,
presumably, he could afford it; though, as far as she was concerned, she
would have been happier with simpler standards and a less ambitious mode
of life. In following the path her parents had marked out for her, and
to some extent beaten in advance, she had acquiesced in their plans
rather than developed wishes of her own. Having grown tired of her
annual round of American and English country-houses, with interludes for
Paris, Biarritz, or Cannes, she had gone on chiefly because, as far as
she could see, there was nothing else to do.

Looking at him now, it came over her for the first time that she must be
a disappointment to him. He had never given her reason to suspect it,
and yet it must be so. First among the aims for which he had been
striving, and to attain to which he had hazarded so much, there must
have been the hope that she should make a brilliant match. That, and
that alone, would have given them as a family the sure international
position he had coveted, and which plenty of other Americans were
successful in securing.

It was only of late years, with the growth of her own independent social
judgment, that she could look back over the past and see the Guions as
in the van of that movement of the New World back upon the Old of which
the force was forever augmenting. As Drusilla Fane was fond of saying,
it was a manifestation of the nomadic, or perhaps the predatory, spirit
characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. It was part of that impulse
to expand, annex, appropriate, which had urged the Angles to descend on
the shores of Kent and the Normans to cross from Dives to Hastings.
Later, it had driven their descendants over the Atlantic, as
individuals, as households, or as "churches"; and now, from their rich,
comfortable, commonplace homes in New England, Illinois, or California,
it bade later descendants still lift up their eyes and see how much
there was to be desired in the lands their ancestors had left
behind--fair parks, stately manors, picturesque châteaux, sonorous
titles, and varied, dignified ways of living.

To a people with the habit of compassing sea and land to get whatever
was good to have the voyage back was nothing, especially in the days of
easy money and steam. The Guions had been among the first to make it.
They had been among the first Americans to descend on the shores of
Europe with the intention--more or less obscure, more or less
acknowledged, as the case might be--of acquiring and enjoying the
treasures of tradition by association or alliance or any other means
that might present themselves. Richard Guion, grandfather of Henry
Guion, found the way to cut a dash in the Paris of the early Second
Empire and to marry his daughter, Victoria Guion, to the Marquis de
Melcourt. From the simple American point of view of that day and date it
was a dazzling match, long talked of by the naïve press of New York,
Boston, and Philadelphia.

By the more ambitious members of the Guion house it was considered as
the beginning of a glorious epoch; but, looking back now, Olivia could
see how meager the results had been. Since those days a brilliant
American society had sprung up on the English stem, like a mistletoe on
an oak; but, while Henry and Charlotta Guion would gladly have struck
their roots into that sturdy trunk, they lacked the money essential to
parasitic growth. As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially the old
royalist phase of it, which offers no crevices on its creaseless bark in
which a foreign seed can germinate, absorbed her within its tough old
blossom as a pitcher-plant sucks in a fly. Henceforth the utmost she
could do for her kith and kin was to force open the trap from time to
time, so that Olivia, if she liked, could be swallowed, too. In that
task the old lady was not only industrious but generous, offering to
subscribe handsomely toward the _dot_, as well as giving it to be
understood that the bride-elect would figure in the end as her residuary
legatee. Owing to this prospect Olivia had been compelled to decline a
comte and a vicomte of crusading ancestry, procured at some pains by
Madame de Melcourt; but when she also refused the eminently eligible Duc
de Berteuil, whose terms in the way of dowry were reasonable, while he
offered her a splendidly historic name and background, the Marquise not
unnaturally lost her temper and declared that she washed her hands of
her grandniece once for all.

Not till this minute had Olivia ever considered that this reluctance on
her part to be "well established" must have been something like a grief
to her father, for he had never betrayed a sign of it. On the contrary,
he had seemed to approve her decisions, and had even agreed with her in
preferring the mistletoe to the pitcher-plant. He welcomed her back to
Tory Hill, where her residences were longer, now that she ceased to be
much with Madame de Melcourt, and yet was always ready with money and
his consent when she had invitations from her friends abroad. On her
engagement to Rupert Ashley he expressed complete satisfaction, and said
in so many words that it was a more appropriate match for her than any
French alliance, however distinguished. His tenderness in this respect
came over her now as peculiarly touching, unsealing the fount of filial
pity at a moment when other motives might have made for indignation and
revolt.

He opened his eyes without giving any other sign of waking.

"Hallo! What are you looking at me for?"

The tone was not impatient, but she heard in it an implication of fear.

"Papa, are your troubles anything like Jack Berrington's?"

He gazed at her without moving a muscle or changing a shade. She only
fancied that in the long look with which he regarded her there was a
receding, sinking, dying light, as though the soul within him was
withdrawing.

"What makes you ask that?"

The intonation was expressionless, and yet, it seemed to her, a little
wary.

"I ask chiefly because--well, because I think they are."

He looked at her for a minute more, perhaps for longer.

"Well, then--you're right."

Again she had the sensation, familiar to her since yesterday, of the
world reeling to pieces around her while her own personality survived.
When she spoke, her voice sounded as if it came out of the wildness of
a surging wreck.

"Then that's what you meant in saying yesterday that when everything was
settled you still wouldn't be able to pay all you owed."

"That's what I meant--exactly."

He lay perfectly still, except that he raised his hand and puffed at his
extinct cigar. She looked down at the pattern on the Persian rug beside
his couch--a symmetrical scroll of old rose, on a black ground sown with
multicolored flowerets.

"I suppose it's the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs you owe the money
to?"

"And the Compton heirs, and old Miss Burnaby, and the two Misses Brown,
and--"

"Haven't they anything left?"

"Oh yes. It isn't all gone, by any means." Then he added, as if to make
a clean breast of the affair and be done with it: "The personal
property--what you may call the cash--is mostly gone! Those that have
owned real estate--like the Rodmans and Fanny Burnaby--well, they've got
that still."

"I see." She continued to sit looking meditatively down at the rug. "I
suppose," she ventured, after long thinking, "that that's the money
we've been living on all these years?"

"Yes; in the main." He felt it useless to quibble or to try to extenuate
the facts.

"How many years would that be?"

"I'm not very sure; on and off, it's about ten since I began using some
of their money to--help out my income. Latterly--you may as well know
it--I haven't had any real income of my own at all."

"So that their money has been paying for--for all this."

Her hands made a confused little gesture, indicating the luxury of his
personal appointments and of the room.

He shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows in a kind of protest,
which was nevertheless not denial. "W-well! If you choose to put it so!"

"And for me, too," she went on, looking at him now with a bewildered
opening of her large gray eyes--"for my visits, my clothes, my
maid--everything!"

"I don't see any need," he said, with a touch of peevishness, "for going
so terribly into detail."

"I don't see how it can be helped. It's so queer--and startling--to
think I've had so much that wasn't mine."

"You mustn't think it was deliberately planned--" he began, weakly.

"And now the suggestion is," she interrupted, "that Mr. Davenant should
pay for it. That seems to me to make it even worse than--than before."

"I confess I don't follow you there," he complained. "If he
doesn't--then I go to Singville."

"Wouldn't you rather?"

He raised himself stiffly into a sitting posture. "Would _you_?"

She did not hesitate in her reply. "Yes, papa. I _would_ rather--if I
were you."

"But since you're not me--since you are yourself--would you still rather
that I went to Singville?"

There was a little lift to her chin, a faint color in her face as she
replied: "I'd rather pay--however I did it. I'd rather pay--in any
way--than ask some one else to do it."

He fell back on the cushion of violet brocade. "So would I--if I had
only myself to think of. We're alike in that."

"Do you mean that you'd rather do it if it wasn't for me?"

"I've got to take everything into consideration. It's no use for me to
make bad worse by refusing a good offer. I must try to make the best of
a bad business for every one's sake. I don't want to take Davenant's
money. It's about as pleasant for me as swallowing a knife. But I'd
swallow a knife if we could only hush the thing up long enough for you
to be married--and for me to settle some other things. I shouldn't care
what happened after that. They might take me and chuck me into any hole
they pleased."

"But I couldn't be married in that way, papa dear. I couldn't be married
at all to--to one man--when another man had a claim on me."

"Had a claim on you? How do you mean?"

"He'll have that--if he pays for everything--pays for everything for
years and years back. Don't you see?"

"A claim on you for what, pray?"

"That's what I don't know. But whatever it is, I shall feel that I'm in
his debt."

"Nonsense, dear. I call that morbid. It _is_ morbid."

"But don't you think it's what he's working for? I can't see anything
else that--that could tempt him; and the minute we make a bargain with
him we agree to his terms."

There was a long silence before he said, wearily:

"If we call the deal off we must do it with our eyes open to the
consequences. Ashley would almost certainly throw you over--"

"No; because that possibility couldn't arise."

"And you'll have to be prepared for the disgrace--"

"I shall not look on it as disgrace so much as--paying. It will be
paying for what we've had--if not in one sort of coin, then in another.
But whatever it is, we shall be paying the debt ourselves; we sha'n't be
foisting it off on some one else."

"Why do you say we?"

"Well, won't it be we? I shall have my part in it, sha'n't I? You
wouldn't shut me out from that? I've had my share of the--of the wrong,
so I ought to take my share in the reparation. My whole point is that we
should be acting together."

"They can't put _you_ in Singville."

"No; but they can't keep me from sitting outside the walls. I shall want
to do that, papa, if you're within. I'm not going to separate myself
from you--or from anything you're responsible for. I couldn't if I
wanted to; but as it happens I shouldn't try. I should get a kind of
satisfaction out of it, shouldn't you?--the satisfaction of knowing that
every day we suffered, and every night we slept through or wept
through, and every bit of humiliation and dishonor, was so much
contributed to the great work of--paying up. Isn't that the way you'd
take it?"

"That's all very fine now, dear, when you're--what shall I say?--a
little bit _exaltée_; but how do you think you'll feel when they've--when
they've"--he continued to speak with his eyes shut convulsively--"when
they've arrested me and tried me and sentenced me and locked me up for
ten or fifteen years?"

"I shall feel as if the bitterness of death were past. But I should feel
worse than that--I should feel as if the bitterness of both death and
hell were still to come if we didn't make an effort to shoulder our own
responsibilities."

There was more in the same vein. He listened for the greater part of the
time with his eyes closed. He was too unutterably tired to argue or to
contest her point of view. Beyond suggesting that there were sides to
the question she hadn't yet considered, he felt helpless. He was
restrained, too, from setting them forth by a certain hesitation in
demanding from her anything she did not concede of her own accord. That
she would ultimately see for herself he had little doubt. In any case he
was more or less indifferent from sheer spiritual exhaustion. He had
ceased to direct, or try to direct, his own affairs or those of any one
else. In his present condition he could only lie still and let come what
might. Fate or God would arrange things either in the way of adjustment
or of fatal ruin without interference on his part.

So as he lay and listened to his daughter he uttered some bit of reason
or some feeble protest only now and then. When, occasionally, he looked
at her, it was to see her--somewhat deliriously--white, slim, ethereal,
inexorable, like the law of right. He was feverish; his head throbbed;
whenever he opened his eyes the objects in the room seemed to whirl
about, while she sat tense, low-voiced, gentle, a spirit of expiation.

Among the various ways in which he had thought she might take his dread
announcement this one had never occurred to him; and yet, now that he
saw it, he recognized it as just what he might have expected from the
almost too rigid rectitude and decidedly too uncompromising pride that
made up her character. It was the way, too, he admitted, most worthy of
a Guion. It was the way he would have chosen for himself if he had
nothing to consider but his own tastes. He himself was as eager in his
way to make satisfaction as she; he was only deterred by considerations
of common sense. From the point of view of a man of business it was more
than a little mad to refuse the money that would pay his creditors, hush
up a scandal, and keep the course of daily life running in something
like its accustomed channel, merely because for the rest of his days he
must be placed in a humiliating moral situation. He wouldn't like that,
of course; and yet everything else was so much worse for his clients,
even more than for himself. This was something she did not see. In spite
of the measure in which he had agreed with her heroic views of
"paying," he returned to that thought after she had kissed him and gone
away.

During the conversation with him Olivia had so completely forgotten
Davenant that when she descended to the oval sitting-room she was
scarcely surprised to find that he had left and that Drusilla Fane was
waiting in his place.

"You see, Olivia," Mrs. Fane reasoned, in her sympathetic, practical
way, "that if you're not going to have your wedding on the 28th, you've
got to do something about it now."

"What would you do?"

Olivia brought her mind back with some effort from the consideration of
the greater issues to fix it on the smaller ones. In its way Drusilla's
interference was a welcome diversion, since the point she raised was
important enough to distract Olivia's attention from decisions too
poignant to dwell on long.

"I've thought that over," Drusilla explained--"mother and I together. If
we were you we'd simply scribble a few lines on your card and send it
round by post."

"Yes? And what would you scribble?"

"We'd say--you see, it wouldn't commit you to anything too pointed--we'd
say, simply, 'Miss Guion's marriage to Colonel Ashley will not take
place on October 28th.' There you'd have nothing but the statement, and
they could make of it what they liked."

"Which would be a good deal, wouldn't it?"

"Human nature being human nature, Olivia, you can hardly expect people
not to talk. But you're in for that, you know, whatever happens now."

"Oh, of course."

"So that the thing to do is to keep them from going to the church next
Thursday fortnight, and from pestering you with presents in the mean
while. When you've headed them off on that you'll feel more free to--to
give your mind to other things."

The suggestion was so sensible that Olivia fell in with it at once. She
accepted, too, Drusilla's friendly offer to help in the writing of the
cards, of which it would be necessary to send out some two hundred.
There being no time to lose, they set themselves immediately to the
task, Drusilla at the desk, and Olivia writing on a blotting-pad at a
table. They worked for twenty minutes or half an hour in silence.

"Miss Guion's marriage to Colonel Ashley will not take place on October
28th."

"Miss Guion's marriage to Colonel Ashley will not take place on October
28th."

"Miss Guion's marriage to Colonel Ashley will not take place on October
28th."

The words, which to Olivia had at first sounded something like a knell,
presently became, from the monotony of repetition, nothing but a
sing-song. She went on writing them mechanically, but her thoughts began
to busy themselves otherwise.

"Drusilla, do you remember Jack Berrington?"

The question slipped out before she saw its significance. She might not
have perceived it so quickly even then had it not been for the second
of hesitation before Drusilla answered and the quaver in her voice when
she did.

"Y-es."

The amount of information contained in the embarrassment with which this
monosyllable was uttered caused Olivia to feel faint. It implied that
Drusilla had been better posted than herself; and if Drusilla, why not
others?

"Do you know what makes me think of him?"

Again there was a second of hesitation. Without relaxing the speed with
which she went on scribbling the same oft-repeated sentence, Olivia knew
that her companion stayed her pen and half turned round.

"I can guess."

Olivia kept on writing. "How long have you known?"

Drusilla threw back the answer while blotting with unnecessary force the
card she had just written: "A couple of days."

"Has it got about--generally?"

"Generally might be too much to say. Some people have got wind of it;
and, of course, a thing of that kind spreads."

"Of course."

After all, she reflected, perhaps it was just as well that the story
should have come out. It was no more possible to keep it quiet than to
calm an earthquake. She had said just now to her father that she would
regard publicity less as disgrace than as part of the process of paying
up. Very well! If they were a mark for idle tongues, then so much the
better, since in that way they were already contributing some few pence
toward quenching the debt.

"I should feel worse about it," Drusilla explained, after a silence of
some minutes, "if I didn't think that Peter Davenant was trying to do
something to--to help Cousin Henry out."

Olivia wrote energetically. "What's he doing?"

"Oh, the kind of thing men do. They seem to have wonderful ways of
raising money."

"How do you know he's trying it?"

"I don't know for certain; I've only an idea. I rather gather it by the
queer way he comes and goes. The minute a thing is in Peter's hands--"

"Have you such a lot of confidence in him?"

"For this sort of thing--yes. He's terribly able, so they say,
financially. For the matter of that, you can see it by the way he's made
all that money. Bought mines, or something, and sold them again. Bought
'em for nothing, and sold 'em for thousands and thousands."

"Did I ever tell you that he once asked me to marry him?"

Drusilla wheeled round in her chair and stared, open-mouthed, at her
friend's back.

"_No_!"

"Oh, it was years ago. I dare say he's forgotten it."

"I'll bet you ten to one he hasn't."

Olivia took another card and wrote rapidly. "Do you suppose," she said,
trying to speak casually, "that his wanting to help papa out has
anything to do with that?"

"I shouldn't wonder. I shouldn't wonder at all."

"What _could_ it have?"

"Oh, don't ask me! How should I know? Men are so queer. He's getting
some sort of satisfaction out of it, you may depend."

Drusilla answered as she would have liked to be answered were she in a
similar position. That an old admirer should come to her aid like a god
from the machine would have struck her as the most touching thing in the
world. As she wheeled round again to her task it was not without a pang
of wholly impersonal envy at so beautiful a tribute. She had written two
or three cards before she let fall the remark:

"And now poor, dear old mother is manoeuvering to have _me_ marry
him."

The idea was not new to Olivia, so she said, simply, "And are you going
to?"

"Oh, I don't know." Drusilla sighed wearily, then added: "I sha'n't if I
can help it."

"Does that mean that you'll take him if you can't do better?"

"It means that I don't know what I shall do at all. I'm rather sick of
everything--and so I might do anything. I don't want to come back to
live in America, and yet I feel an alien over there, now that I haven't
Gerald to give me a _raison d'être_. They're awfully nice to me--at
Southsea--at Silchester--everywhere--and yet they really don't want me.
I can see that as plainly as I can see your name on this card. But I
can't keep away from them. I've no pride. At least, I've got the pride,
but there's something in me stronger than pride that makes me a kind of
craven. I'm like a dog that doesn't mind being kicked so long as he can
hang about under the dining-room table to sniff up crumbs. With my
temperament it's perfectly humiliating, but I can't help it. I've got
the taste for that English life as a Frenchman gets a taste for
absinthe--knows that it'll be the ruin of him, and yet goes on
drinking."

"I suppose you're not in love with any one over there?"

There was no curiosity in this question. Olivia asked it--she could
scarcely tell why. She noticed that Drusilla stopped writing again and
once more half turned round, though it was not till long afterward that
she attached significance to the fact.

"Who on earth should I be in love with? What put that into your head?"

"Oh, I don't know. Stranger things have happened. You see a great many
men--"

So they went skimming over the surface of confidence, knowing that
beneath what they said there were depths below depths that they dared
not disturb. All the same, it was some relief to both when the maid came
to the door to summon them to luncheon.




IX


During the next day and the next Guion continued ill, so ill that his
daughter had all she could attend to in the small tasks of nursing. The
lull in events, however, gave her the more time for thinking, and in her
thoughts two things struck her as specially strange. Of these, the first
and more remarkable was the degree to which she identified herself with
her father's wrong-doing. The knowledge that she had for so many years
been profiting by his misdeeds produced in her a curious sense of having
shared them. Though she took pains to remind herself that she was
morally guiltless, there was something within her--an imaginative
quality perhaps that rejected the acquittal. Pity, too, counted in her
mental condition, as did also that yearning instinct called maternal,
which keeps women faithful to the weak and the fallen among those they
love. To have washed her own hands and said, "See here! I am innocent!"
would have seemed to her much like desertion of a broken old man who had
no one but her to stand by him. Even while she made attempts to reason
herself out of it, the promptings to the vicarious acceptance of guilt,
more or less native to the exceptionally strong and loyal, was so
potent in her that she found herself saying, in substance if not in
words, "Inasmuch as he did it, I did it, too." It was not a purposely
adopted stand on her part; it was not even clear to her why she was
impelled to take it; she took it only because, obeying the dictates of
her nature; she could do nothing else.

Nevertheless, it occasioned her some surprise, whenever she had time to
think of it, to note the speed with which she had adapted herself to the
facts. Once revealed, she seemed to have always known them--to have
shared that first embarrassment for ready money that had induced her
father to borrow from funds so temptingly under his control, and to have
gone on with him, step by step, through the subsequent years of struggle
and disaster. They were years over which the sun was already darkened
and the moon turned into blood, so that, looking back on them, it was
almost impossible to recapture the memory of the light-heartedness with
which she had lived through them. It was incredible to her now that they
had been years of traveling and visiting and dancing and hunting and
motoring and yachting, of following fashion and seeking pleasure in
whatever might have been the vogue of the minute. Some other self, some
pale, secondary, astral self, must have crossed and recrossed the
Atlantic and been a guest in great houses and become a favorite in
London, Paris, Biarritz, Florida, Scotland, Rome! Some other self must
have been sought out for her society, admired for her style, and
privileged to refuse eligible suitors! Some other self must have met
Rupert Ashley in the little house at Southsea and promised to become his
wife! From the standpoint of the present it seemed to her as if an
unreal life had ended in an unreal romance that was bringing to her,
within a day or two, an unreal hero. She was forced again face to face
with that fact that the man who was coming to marry her was, for all
practical knowledge that she had of him, a stranger. In proportion as
calamity encompassed her he receded, taking his place once more in that
dim world she should never have frequented and in which she had no
longer lot nor part.

She should never have frequented it for the simple reason that for all
she had brought to it or got from it some one else had to pay. The
knowledge induced a sense of shame which no consciousness of committed
crime could have exceeded. She would have been less humiliated had she
plotted and schemed to win flattery and homage for herself than she was
in discovering that people had been tricked into giving them
spontaneously. To drop the mask, to tear asunder the robe of pretense,
to cry the truth from the housetops, and, like some Scriptural woman
taken in adultery, lie down, groaning and stunned, under the pelting of
the stones of those who had not sinned, became to her, as the hours
dragged on, an atonement more and more imperative.

But the second odd fact she had to contemplate was the difficulty of
getting a new mode of life into operation. Notwithstanding all her
eagerness to pay, the days were still passing in gentle routine
somewhat quietly because of her father's indisposition, but with the
usual household dignity. There was a clock-work smoothness about life at
Tory Hill, due to the most competent service secured at the greatest
expense. Old servants, and plenty of them, kept the wheels going
noiselessly even while they followed with passionate interest the drama
being played in the other part of the house. To break in on the course
of their duties, to disturb them, or put a stop to them, was to Olivia
like an attempt to counteract the laws that regulate the sunrise. She
knew neither how to set about it nor where to begin. There was something
poignant in the irony of these unobtrusive services from the minute when
her maid woke her in the morning till she helped her to change her dress
for dinner, and yet there was nothing for it but to go through the
customary daily round. When it became necessary to tell the women that
the preparations for the wedding must be stopped and that the
invitations to the two big dinners that were to be given in honor of
Colonel Ashley had been withdrawn she gathered from small signs--the
feigned stolidity of some of them and the overacted astonishment of
others--that they had probably been even better informed than Drusilla
Fane. After that the food they brought her choked her and the maid's
touch on her person was like fire, while she still found herself obliged
to submit to these long-established attentions.

She was reduced to drawing patience from what Guion told her as to his
illness checking temporarily the course of legal action. Most of the
men with whom it lay to set the law in motion, notably Dixon, the
District-Attorney, were old friends of his, who would hesitate to drag
him from a sick-room to face indictment. He had had long interviews with
Dixon about the case already, and knew how reluctant that official was
to move in the matter, anyhow; but as soon as he, Guion, was out and
about again, all kindly scruples would have to yield. "You'll find," he
explained to her, "that the question as to breaking-camp will settle
itself then. And besides," he added, "it'll be better to wait till
Ashley comes and you know what he's likely to do for you."

With the last consideration she could not but agree, though she shrank
from his way of putting it. It was some satisfaction at least to know
that, since the two hundred cards she had sent out had reached their
recipients, the process of public penance must in some measure have been
started. She had seen no one who could tell her what the effect had
been; her bridesmaids evidently knew enough to consider silence the
better part of sympathy; not even Drusilla Fane had looked in or called
her on the telephone during the last day or two; but she could imagine
pretty well the course that comment and speculation must be taking
through the town. There would be plenty of blame, some jubilation, and,
she felt sure, not a little sympathy withal. There was among her
acquaintance a local American pride that had always been jealous of her
European preferences and which would take the opportunity to get in its
bit of revenge, but in general opinion would be kindly. There came an
afternoon when she felt the desire to go forth to face it, to take her
first impressions of the world in her new relationship toward it. She
had not been beyond their own gate since the altered conditions had
begun to obtain. She had need of the fresh air; she had need to find her
bearings; she had need of a few minutes' intercourse with some one
besides her father, so as not to imperil her judgment by dwelling too
incessantly on an _idée fixe_. Rupert Ashley would land that night or
the next morning. In forty-eight hours he would probably be in Boston.
It was prudent, she reflected, to be as well poised and as sure of
herself as possible before his arrival on the scene.

Her father was slightly better. He could leave his bed, and, wrapped in
his violet dressing-gown, could lie on the chaise-longue, surrounded by
the luxurious comforts that were a matter of course to him. As she made
him snug he observed with a grim smile that his recovery was a pity. He
could almost hear, so he said, Dixon and Johnstone and Hecksher and
others of his cronies making the remark that his death would be a lucky
way out of the scrape.

She had come, dressed for the street, to tell him she was walking down
to the Temples', to see what had become of Drusilla Fane. She thought it
needless to add that she was inventing the errand in order to go out and
take notes on the new aspect the world must henceforth present to her.

He looked at her with an approval that gradually merged into a sense of
comfort. She had chosen the simplest dress and hat in her wardrobe, as
significant of a chastened soul; but simplicity more than anything else
emphasized her distinction. "She'll be all right," he said, consolingly,
to himself. "Whatever happens she's the kind to come out on top. Rupert
Ashley would be a fool to throw over a superb, high-spirited creature
like that. He'll not do it. Of that I feel sure."

The conviction helped him to settle more luxuriously into the depths of
his couch and to relish the flavor of his cigar. He was quite sincere in
the feeling that if she were but safe he should be more or less
indifferent to the deluge overwhelming himself.

"Papa," she ventured at last, watching carefully the action of the
little silver button-hook, as she buttoned her gloves, "if that Mr.
Davenant came while I'm gone, you wouldn't change your mind, would you?"

"I don't think he's in the least likely to turn up."

"But if he did?"

"Well, I suppose you'll be back before long. We couldn't settle anything
without talking it over, in any case."

Forced to be content with that, she kissed him and turned away.

[Illustration: SHE FOUND COMFORT IN GETTING INTO THE OPEN AIR]

She found a comfort in getting into the open air, into the friendly
streets, under the shade of the familiar trees, that surprised her. The
absence of pose characteristic of the average American town struck her
for the first time as soothing. With none of the effort to make life
conform to a rigid standard of propriety, which in an English community
would be the first thing to notice, there was an implied invitation to
the spirit to relax. In the slap-dash, go-as-you-please methods of
building, paving, and cleaning she saw a tacit assumption that,
perfection being not of this world, one is permitted to rub along
without it. Rodney Lane, which in Colonial days had led to Governor
Rodney's "Mansion," had long ago been baptized Algonquin Avenue by civic
authorities with a love of the sonorous, but it still retained the
characteristics of a New England village street. Elms arched over it
with the regularity of a Gothic vaulting, and it straggled at its will.
Its houses, set in open lawns, illustrated all the phases of the
national taste in architecture as manifested throughout the nineteenth
century, from the wooden Greek temple with a pillared façade of the
early decades to the bizarre compositions, painted generally in dark red
and yellow, with many gables and long sweeps of slanting roof, which
marked that era's close. In most cases additions had been thrown out
from time to time, ells trailing at the back, or excrescences bulging at
the sides, that were not grotesque only because there had been little in
the first effect to spoil. In more than one instance the original fabric
was altered beyond recognition; here and there a house she could
remember had altogether disappeared; a new one had replaced it that
before long might be replaced by a newer still. To Olivia the consoling
thought was precisely in this state of transition, to which rapid
vicissitude, for better or for worse, was something like a law. It made
the downfall of her own family less exceptional, less bitter, when
viewed as part of a huge impermanency, shifting from phase to phase,
with no rule to govern it but the necessities of its own development.

Until this minute it was the very element in American life she had found
most distasteful. Her inclinations, carefully fostered by her parents,
had always been for the solid, the well-ordered, the assured, evolved
from precedent to precedent till its conventions were fixed and its
doings regulated as by a code of etiquette. Now, all of a sudden, she
perceived that life in shirt-sleeves possessed certain advantages over a
well-bred existence in full dress. It allowed the strictly human
qualities an easier sort of play. Where there was no pretense at turning
to the world a smooth, impeccable social front, toil and suffering,
misfortune and disgrace, became things to be less ashamed of.
Practically every one in these unpretentious, tree-shaded houses knew
what it was to struggle upward, with many a slip backward in the process
and sometimes a crashing fall from the top. These accidents were
understood. The result was the creation of a living atmosphere, not
perhaps highly civilized, but highly sympathetic, charged with the
comprehension of human frailty, into which one could carry one's
dishonor, not wholly with equanimity, but at least with the knowledge
that such burdens were not objects for astonishment. As she descended
the hill, therefore, she felt, as she had never felt before, the
comforting assurance of being among brethren, before whom she should not
have the wearisome task of "keeping up appearances," and by whom she
would be supported, even at the worst, through a fellow-feeling with her
cares.

This consciousness helped her to be firm when, a few minutes later,
having reached the dike by the border of the Charles, she came face to
face with Peter Davenant. She saw him from a long way off, but without
recognition. She noticed him only as an unusually tall figure, in a
summery gray suit and a gray felt hat. He was sauntering in a leisurely
way toward her, stopping now and then to admire some beautiful dog
sniffing the scent of water-rats in the weeds, or a group of babies
tumbling on the sand, or a half-naked undergraduate sculling along the
serpentine reaches of the river, or a college crew cleaving the waters
with the precision of an arrow, to a long, rhythmic swing of eight slim
bodies and a low, brief grunt of command. The rich October light
striking silvery gleams from the walls of the Stadium and burnished gold
from the far-off dome of the State House brought all the hues of fire
from the rim of autumnal hills on the western horizon. It touched up
with soft dove-gray, in which were shades of green and purple, the row
of unpainted, ramshackle wooden cabins--hovels of a colony of
"squatters" that no zeal for civic improvement had ever been able to
dislodge--lined along a part of the embankment, and wrought indefinable
glories in the unkempt marshes, stretching away into shimmering
distances, where factory windows blazed as if from inner conflagration
and steam and smoke became roseate or iridescent.

The tall stranger, so much better dressed than the men who usually
strolled on the embankment at this hour of a week-day afternoon, fixed
her attention to such a degree as to make her forget that she herself
was probably a subject of curiosity and speculation among the
passers-by. It was with a little disappointment that as she came nearer
she said to herself, "It's only--that man." Common fairness, however,
obliged her to add that he seemed "more like a gentleman" than she had
supposed. That he was good-looking, in a big, blond, Scotch or
Scandinavian way, she had acknowledged from the first. On recognizing
Davenant her impulse was to pass him with the slightest recognition, but
on second thoughts it seemed best to her to end the affair impending
between them once for all.

"I'm sorry you didn't wait for me to come downstairs the other day," she
said, after they had exchanged greetings, "because I could have told you
that my father agreed with me--that it wouldn't be possible for us to
accept your kind help."

"I hope he's better," was Davenant's only answer.

"Much better, thank you. When he's able to see you, I know he will want
to express his gratitude more fully than I can."

"I hoped he'd be able to see me to-day. I was on my way to Tory Hill."

She was annoyed both by his persistency and by the coolness of his
manner, as, leaning on his stick, he stood looking down at her. He
looked down in a way that obliged her to look up. She had not realized
till now how big and tall he was. She noticed, too, the squareness of
his jaw, the force of his chin, and the compression of his straight,
thin lips beneath the long curve of his mustache. In spite of his air of
granite imperturbability, she saw that his fair skin was subject to
little flushes of embarrassment or shyness, like a girl's. As she was in
a mood to criticize, she called this absurd and said of his blue eyes,
resting on her with a pensive directness, as though he were studying her
from a long way off, that they were hard. Deep-set and caverned under
heavy, overhanging brows, they more than any other feature imparted to
his face the frowning and _farouche_ effect by which she judged him. Had
it not been for that, her hostility to everything he said and did might
not have been so prompt. That he was working to get her into his power
became more than ever a conviction the minute she looked into what she
called that lowering gaze.

All the same, the moment was one for diplomatic action rather than for
force. She allowed a half-smile to come to her lips, and her voice to
take a tone in which there was frank request, as she said: "I wish you
wouldn't go."

"I shouldn't if it wasn't important. I don't want to annoy you more than
I can help."

"I don't see how anything can be important when--when there's nothing to
be done."

"There's a good deal to be done if we choose to do it; but we must
choose at once. The Benn crowd is getting restive."

"That doesn't make any difference to us. My father has decided to take
the consequences of his acts."

"You say that so serenely that I guess you don't understand yet just
what they'd be."

"I do--I do, perfectly. My father and I have talked it all over. We know
it will be terrible; and yet it would be more terrible still to let some
one else pay our debts. I dare say you think me monstrous, but--"

"I think you mistaken. I don't want to say more than that. If I find Mr.
Guion of the same opinion--"

"I see. You don't consider my word sufficient."

"Your word is all right, Miss Guion," he tried to laugh. "What you lack
is authority. My dealings are with your father. I can't settle anything
with--a substitute."

She colored swiftly. "I don't presume to settle anything. I only thought
I might give you some necessary information. I hoped, too, to save you a
little trouble in sparing you the walk to Tory Hill."

He looked away from her, his eyes wandering up the reach of the river,
over which the long, thin, many-oared college craft shot like insects
across a pool.

"Why should you be so bent on seeing your father follow Jack Berrington,
when it could be avoided?"

"Why should you care? What difference does it make to you? If you'd only
explain that--"

"It explains itself. If I saw a woman leap into the river there I should
pull her out. The more she insisted on being drowned, the more I should
try to save her."

"But, you see, I'm not leaping into a river. On the contrary, I'm
getting out of one. It seems to me that you'd be only forcing me back
and making my last state worse than the first."

It took him a minute to grasp the force of this. "That would depend, of
course, on the point of view. As a matter of fact, it's something with
which I've nothing to do. It concerns you, and it concerns Mr. Guion,
but it doesn't concern me. For me the whole thing is very simple. I've
offered to lend Mr. Guion a sum of money. It's for him to take or to
leave. If he refuses it, I sha'n't be offended; and if he doesn't refuse
it--"

"You'd let him have it, just the same?"

"Of course. Why not?"

"In spite of all I've said as to what I should feel?"

"But I'm not supposed to know anything about that, you know. I repeat
that it isn't my affair. If Mr. Guion should accept my loan against your
wishes--well, that's something you'd have to fix up with him."

She was some minutes silent, her eyes ranging over the river and the
marshes, like his own.

"If you urged it on him," she said at last, "I think he'd take it."

"Then so much the better, from my point of view."

"Precisely; but then your point of view is a mystery. Not that it makes
any difference," she hastened to add. "If my father accepts your loan,
it will be for me to pay it back, in one way or another--if I ever can."

"We could talk of that," he smiled, trying to be reassuring, "after more
important things had been settled."

"There wouldn't be anything more important--for me."

"Oh, you wouldn't find me an importunate creditor."

"That wouldn't help matters--so long as I owed the debt. After all, we
belong to that old-fashioned, rather narrow-minded class of New England
people to whom debt of any kind is the source of something like anguish.
At least," she corrected herself, "I belong to that class."

It was on his lips to remind her that in her case there could be no
present release from indebtedness, there could only be a change of
creditors; but he decided to express himself more gracefully.

"Wouldn't it be possible," he asked, "to put the boot on the other foot,
and to consider me as the person to whom the favor is shown in being
allowed to do something useful?"

She lifted her chin scornfully. "That would be childish. It would be a
mere quibbling with words."

"But it would be true. It's the way I should take it."

She confronted him with one of her imperious looks. "Why?"

In the monosyllable there was a demand for complete explanation, but he
met it with one of his frank smiles.

"Couldn't you let me keep that as my secret?"

"So that you would be acting in the daylight and we in the dark."

"You might be in the dark, and still have nothing to be afraid of."

She shook her head. "I _should_ be afraid. It was in the dark, according
to the old story, that the antelope escaped a lion by falling into a
hunter's trap."

"Do I look like that kind of a hunter?" He smiled again at the absurdity
of her comparison.

"You can't tell anything from looks--with men. With men a woman has only
one principle to guide her--to keep on the safe side."

"I hope you won't think me uncivil, Miss Guion, if I point out that, at
present, you haven't got a safe side to keep on. That's what I want to
offer you."

"I might ask you why again, only that we should be going round in a
circle. Since you don't mean to tell me, I must go without knowing; but
I'm sure you can understand that to some natures the lion is less to be
feared than the hunter."

"_He_ doesn't feel so." He nodded his head in the direction of Tory
Hill.

"_He_ feels so. He's only a little--wavering."

"And I guess you're a little wavering, too, Miss Guion, if you'd only
own up to it."

He watched her straighten her slight figure while her delicate features
hardened to an expression of severity. "I'm not wavering on the
principle, nor because of anything I should have to face myself. If I
have any hesitation, it's only because of what it would mean for papa."

He allowed an instant to pass while he looked down at her gravely. "And
he's not the only one, you know," he said, with all the significance he
could put into his tone.

His hint, however, was thrown away, since she was intent on her own line
of thought. With a slight nod of the head, dignified rather than
discourteous, she departed, leaving him, to the great interest of the
passers-by, leaning on his stick and staring after her.




X


As Olivia continued on her way toward Rodney Temple's she was able to
make it clear to herself that a chief reason for her dislike of Davenant
sprang from his immovability. There was something about him like a giant
rock. She got the impression that one might dash against him forever and
hurt no one but oneself. It was a trait new to her among American men,
whom she generally found too yielding where women were concerned. This
man had an aloofness, too, that was curiously disconcerting. He made no
approaches; he took no liberties. If he showed anything that resembled a
personal sentiment toward her, it was dislike. Making that reflection
and using that word, she was almost startled. A woman had sometimes
disliked her; she knew that; but a man--never! And yet it was difficult
to interpret Davenant's bearing toward her in any other way. It was a
bearing in which there were no concessions to her whatever, while there
was in it--it was only too plain!--a distinct intention to ignore her.
For the time being this personal element in the situation loomed larger
than any other. It challenged her; it even annoyed her. At the same time
it gave Davenant an importance in her eyes which she was far from
willing to concede.

Rodney Temple's house, which was really within the borders of Cambridge,
built about 1840 by some Harvard professor in easy circumstances, had
originally resembled a square brick box. In the course of seventy years
it had passed through the hands of several owners, each of whom had
built on an additional box according to his needs. To the north a
rectangular wing of one story had been thrown out as a drawing-room; to
the south a similar projection formed the library and study. A smaller
square crowned the edifice as a cupola, while cubes of varying
dimensions were half visible at the back. Against the warm, red brick a
Wren portico in white-painted wood, together with the white facings of
the windows, produced an effect of vivid spotlessness, tempered by the
variegated foliage of climbing vines. The limitations of the open lawn
were marked by nothing but a line of shrubs.

Having arrived at the door, it was a relief to Olivia, rather than the
contrary, to learn that the ladies were not at home, but that Mr. Temple
himself would be glad to see her if she would come in. He had, in fact,
espied her approach from his study window and had come out into the hall
to insist on her staying. Within a minute or two she found herself
sitting in one of his big, shabby arm-chairs saying things preliminary
to confidence.

It was a large room, with windows on three sides, through which the
light poured in to find itself refracted by a hundred lustrous surfaces.
The first impression received on entering what Rodney Temple called his
work-room was that of color--color unlike that of pictures, flowers,
gems, or sunsets, and yet of extraordinary richness and variety. Low
bookcases, running round the room, offered on the broad shelf forming
the top space for many specimens of that potter's art on which the old
man had made himself an authority. Jars and vases stood on tables,
plaques and platters hung on the walls, each notable for some excellence
in shape, glaze, or decoration. Of Americans of his generation Rodney
Temple had been among the first to respond to an appeal that came from
ages immeasurably far back in the history of man. His imagination had
been stirred in boyhood by watching a common country potter turn off
bowls and flowerpots that sprang from the wheel in exquisite, concentric
forms or like opening lilies of red earth. Here, he had said to himself,
is the beginning of everything we call art--here must have been the
first intimation to man that beauty could be an element in the work of
his own fingers.

In a handicraft that took the dust of the earth to minister to man's
humblest needs, and yet contrived thereby to enrich his aesthetic life,
young Rodney Temple, as he was then, found much that was congenial to
his own mystical aspirations. During his early travels abroad the
factories of Meissen and Sèvres interested him more than the Zwinger and
the Louvre.

He frequented the booths and quays and dingy streets of the older
European cities, bringing out from some lost hiding-place now an Arabic
tile in which the green of the oasis intensified the blue of the desert
sky; now a Persian bowl of hues that changed with a turn of the head or
a quiver of the lids; now a Spanish plaque gleaming with metallic,
opalescent colors, too indefinable to name, too fugitive for the eye to
transmit to memory. Later he picked up strange examples which, like
meteoric stones from another sphere, had found their mysterious way from
Chinese palaces to his grimy haunts in London, Amsterdam, or Florence,
as the case might be--a blue-and-white jar of Chia-ching, or a Han
ceremonial vessel in emerald green, incrusted from long burial, or a
celadon bowl that resembled a cup of jade, or some gorgeously decorated
bit of Famille Verte. He knew at first little or nothing of the nature
and history of these precious "finds." He saw only that they were rare
and lovely and that through beauty as a means of grace he entered into
communion with men who had neither epoch nor ideals in common with
himself.

In the end he became an authority on ceramic art by the simple process
of knowing more about it than anybody else. When the trustees of the
Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts awoke to that fact, he was an assistant
professor of Greek in the University. Under his care, in the new
position they offered him, a collection was formed of great celebrity
and value; but nothing in it was ever quite so dear to him as the modest
treasures he had acquired for himself in the days of his young
enthusiasm, when his fellow-countrymen as yet cared for none of these
things. As Olivia sat and talked her eye traveled absently from barbaric
Rouen cornucopias and cockatoos to the incrusted snails and serpents of
Bernard Palissy, resting long on a flowered jardinière by Veuve Perrin,
of Marseilles. She had little technical knowledge of the objects
surrounding her, but she submitted to the strange and soothing charm
they never failed to work on her--the charm of stillness, of peace, as
of things which, made for common homely uses, had passed beyond that
stage into an existence of serenity and loveliness.

"When you spoke the other day," she said, after the conversation had
turned directly on her father's affairs--"when you spoke the other day
about a pillar of cloud, I suppose you meant what one might call--an
overruling sense of right."

"That might do as one definition."

"Because in that case you may like to know that I think I've seen it."

"I thought you would if you looked for it."

"I didn't look for it. It was just--there!"

"It's always there; only, as in the case of the two disciples on the
Emmaus road, our eyes are holden so that we don't see it."

"I should have seen it easily enough; but if you hadn't told me, I
shouldn't have known what it was. I didn't suppose that we got that kind
of guidance nowadays."

"The light is always shining in darkness, dearie; only the darkness
comprehendeth it not. That's all there is to it."

He sat at his desk, overlooking the embankment and the curves of the
Charles. It was a wide desk littered with papers, but with space, too,
for some of the favorite small possessions that served him as
paper-weights--a Chinese dragon in blue-green enamel, a quaintly
decorated cow in polychrome Delft, a dancing satyr in biscuit de Sèvres.
On the side remote from where he sat was a life-size bust of Christ in
fifteenth-century Italian terra-cotta--the face noble, dignified,
strongly sympathetic--once painted, but now worn to its natural tint,
except where gleams of scarlet or azure showed in the folds of the
vesture. While the old man talked, and chiefly while he listened, the
fingers of his large, delicately articulated hand stroked mechanically
the surfaces of a grotesque Chinese figure carved in apple-green jade.
It was some minutes before Olivia made any response to his last words.
"Things _are_ very dark to me," she confessed, "and yet this light seems
to me absolutely positive. I've had to make a decision that would be too
frightful if something didn't seem to be leading me into the Street
called Straight, as papa says. Did you know Mr. Davenant had offered to
pay our debts?"

He shook his head.

"Of course I couldn't let him do it."

"Couldn't you?"

"Do you think I could?"

"Not if you think differently. You're the only judge."

"But if I don't, you know, papa will have to go--" She hesitated. "You
know what would happen, don't you?"

"I suppose I do."

"And I could prevent it, you see, if I let papa take this money. I have
to assume the responsibility of its refusal. It puts me in a position
that I'm beginning to feel--well, rather terrible."

"Does it?"

"You don't seem very much interested, Cousin Rodney. I hoped you'd give
me some advice."

"Oh, I never give advice. Besides, if you've got into the Street called
Straight, I don't see why you need advice from any one."

"I do. The Street called Straight is all very well, but--"

"Then you're not so sure, after all."

"I'm sure in a way. If it weren't for papa I shouldn't have any doubt
whatever. But it seems so awful for me to drive him into what I don't
think he'd do of his own accord." She went on to explain Davenant's
offer in detail. "So you see," she concluded, "that papa's state of mind
is peculiar. He agrees with me that the higher thing would be not to
take the money; and yet if I gave him the slightest encouragement he
would."

"And you're not going to?"

"How could I, Cousin Rodney? How could I put myself under such an
obligation to a man I hardly know?"

"He could probably afford it."

"Is he so very rich?" There was a hint of curiosity in the tone.

Rodney Temple shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, rich enough. It would pretty
well clean him out; but, then, that would do him good."

"Do him good--how?"

"He's spoiling for work, that fellow is. Since he's had all that money
he's been of no use to himself or to anybody else. He's like good
capital tied up in a stocking instead of being profitably invested."

"And yet we could hardly put ourselves in a humiliating situation just
to furnish Mr. Davenant with an incentive for occupation, could we,
Cousin Rodney?"

"I dare say not."

"And he isn't offering us the money merely for the sake of getting rid
of it, do you think?"

"Then what _is_ he offering it to you for?"

"That's exactly what I want to know. Haven't you any idea?"

"Haven't you?"

She waited a minute before deciding to speak openly. "I suppose you
never heard that he once asked me to marry him?"

He betrayed his surprise by the way in which he put down the little
Chinese figure and wheeled round more directly toward her.

"Who? Peter?"

She nodded.

"What the dickens made him do that?"

She opened her eyes innocently. "I'm sure I can't imagine."

"It isn't a bit like him. You must have led him on."

"I didn't," she declared, indignantly. "I never took any notice of him
at all. Nothing could have astonished me more than his--his
presumption."

"And what did you say to him? Did you box his ears?"

"I was very rude, and that's partly the trouble now. I feel as if he'd
been nursing a grudge against me all these years--and was paying it."

"In that case he's got you on the hip, hasn't he? It's a lovely turning
of the tables."

"You see that, Cousin Rodney, don't you? I _couldn't_ let a man like
that get the upper hand of me."

"Of course you couldn't, dear. I'd sit on him if I were you, and sit on
him hard. I'd knock him flat--and let Delia Rodman and Clorinda Clay go
to the deuce."

She looked at him wonderingly. "Let--who--go to the deuce?"

"I said Delia Rodman and Clorinda Clay. I might have included Fanny
Burnaby and the Brown girls. I meant them, of course. I suppose you've
been doing a lot of worrying on their account."

"I--I haven't," she stammered. "I haven't thought of them at all."

"Then I wouldn't. They've got no legal claim on you whatever. When they
put their money into your father's hands--or when other people put it
there for them--they took their chances. Life is full of risks like
that. You're not responsible for them, not any more than you are for the
fortunes of war. If they've had bad luck, then that's their own lookout.
Oh, I shouldn't have them on my mind for a minute."

She was too startled to suspect him of ruse or strategy.

"I haven't had them on my mind. It seems queer--and yet I haven't. Now
that you speak of them, of course I see--" She passed her hand across her
brow. There was a long, meditative silence before she resumed. "I don't
know what I've been dreaming of that it didn't occur to me before. Papa
and Mr. Davenant both said that I hadn't considered all the sides to the
question; and I suppose that's what they were thinking of. It seems so
obvious--now."

She adjusted her veil and picked up her parasol as though about to take
leave; but when she rose it was only to examine, without seeing it, a
plaque hanging on the wall.

"If papa were to take Mr. Davenant's money," she said, after long
silence, without turning round, "then his clients would be as well off
as before, wouldn't they?"

"I presume they would."

"And now, I suppose, they're very poor."

"I don't know much about that. None of them were great heiresses, as it
was. Miss Prince, who keeps the school, told your cousin Cherry
yesterday that the Rodman girls had written her from Florence, asking if
she could give them a job to teach Italian. They'll have to teach away
like blazes now--anything and everything they know."

She turned round toward him, her eyes misty with distress.

"See this bit of jade?" he continued, getting up from his chair. "Real
jade that is. Cosway, of the Gallery, brought it to me when he came home
from Peking. That's not real jade you've got at Tory Hill. It's
jadeite."

"Is it?" She took the little mandarin in her hand, but without examining
him. "I've no doubt you've been dreadfully worried about them--papa's
clients, I mean."

"W-well--a little--or, rather, not at all. That is, I should have been
worried if it hadn't been for the conviction that something would look
out for them. Something always does, you know."

The faint smile that seemed to have got frozen on her lips quivered
piteously. "I wish you could have that comfortable feeling about me."

"Oh, I have. That'll be all right. You'll be taken care of from start to
finish. Don't have a qualm of doubt about it. There's a whole host of
ministering spirits--angels some people call them--I don't say I should
myself--but there are legions of mighty influences appointed to wait on
just such brave steps as you're about to take."

"That is, if I take them!"

"Oh, you'll take 'em all right, dearie. You'll not be able to help it
when you see just what they ought to be. In a certain sense they'll take
you. You'll be passed along from point to point as safely as that bit of
jade"--he took the carving from between her fingers and held it up--"as
safely as that bit of jade has been transmitted from the quarries of
Tibet to brighten my old eyes. It's run no end of risks, but the Angel
of Beauty has watched over all its journeys. It's been in every sort of
queer, mysterious place; it's passed through the hands of mandarins,
merchants, and slaves; it's probably stood in palaces and been exposed
in shops; it's certainly come over mountains and down rivers and across
seas; and yet here it is, as perfect as when some sallow-faced dwarf of
a craftsman gave it the last touch of the tool a hundred years ago. And
that's the way it'll be with you, dearie. You may go through some
difficult places, but you'll come out as unscathed as my little
Chinaman. The Street called Straight is often a crooked one; and yet
it's the surest and safest route we can take from point to point."

       *       *       *       *       *

As, a few minutes later, she hurried homeward, this mystical optimism
was to her something like a rose to a sick man--beautiful to
contemplate, but of little practical application in alleviating pain.
Her mind turned away from it. It turned away, too, from the pillar of
cloud, of which the symbolism began to seem deceptive. Under the stress
of the moment the only vision to which she could attain was that of the
Misses Rodman begging for the pitiful job of teaching Italian in a young
ladies' school. She remembered them vaguely--tall, scraggy, permanently
girlish in dress and manner, and looking their true fifty only about the
neck and eyes. With their mother they lived in a pretty villa on the
Poggio Imperiale, and had called on her occasionally when she passed
through Florence. The knowledge of being indebted to them, of having
lived on their modest substance and reduced them to poverty, brought her
to the point of shame in which it would have been a comfort to have the
mountains fall on her and the rocks cover her from the gaze of men. She
upbraided herself for her blindness to the most obviously important
aspect of the situation. Now that she saw it, her zeal to "pay," by
doing penance in public, became tragic and farcical at once. The
absurdity of making satisfaction to Mrs. Rodman and Mrs. Clay, to Fanny
Burnaby and the Brown girls, by calling in the law, when less
suffering--to her father at least--would give them actual cash, was not
the least element in her humiliation.

She walked swiftly, seeing nothing of the cheerful stir around her,
lashed along by the fear that Peter Davenant might have left Tory Hill.
She was too intent on her purpose to perceive any change in her mental
attitude toward him. She was aware of saying to herself that everything
concerning him must be postponed; but beyond that she scarcely thought
of him at all. Once the interests of the poor women who had trusted to
her father had been secured, she would have time to face the claims of
this new creditor; but nothing could be attempted till the one
imperative duty was performed.

Going up the stairs toward her father's room, the sound of voices
reassured her. Davenant was there still. That was so much relief. She
was able to collect herself, to put on something like her habitual air
of quiet dignity, before she pushed open the door and entered.

Guion was lying on the couch with the rug thrown over him. Davenant
stood by the fireplace, endangering with his elbow a dainty Chelsea
shepherdess on the mantelpiece. He was smoking one of Guion's cigars,
which he threw into an ash-tray as Olivia came in.

Conversation stopped abruptly on her appearance. She herself walked
straight to the round table in the middle of the room, and for a second
or two, which seemed much longer in space of time, stood silent, the
tips of her fingers just touching a packet of papers strapped with
rubber bands, which she guessed that Davenant must have brought. Through
her downcast lashes she could see, thrown carelessly on the table, three
or four strips, tinted blue or green or yellow, which she recognized as
checks.

"I only want to say," she began, with a kind of panting in her
breath--"I only want to say, papa, that if ... Mr. Davenant will ...
lend you the money ... I shall be ... I shall be ... very glad."

Guion said nothing. His eyes, regarding her aslant, had in them the
curious receding light she had noticed once before. With a convulsive
clutching of the fingers he pulled the rug up about his chin. Davenant
stood as he had been standing when she came in, his arm resting on the
mantelpiece. When she looked at him with one hasty glance, she noticed
that he reddened hotly.

"I've changed my mind," she went on, impelled by the silence of the
other two to say something more. "I've changed my mind. It's because of
papa's clients--the Miss Rodmans and the others--that I've done it. I
couldn't help it. I never thought of them till this afternoon. I don't
know why. I've been very dense. I've been cruel. I've considered only
how we--papa and I--could exonerate ourselves, if you can call it
exoneration. I'm sorry."

"You couldn't be expected to think of everything at once, Miss Guion,"
Davenant said, clumsily.

"I might have been expected to think of this; but I didn't. I suppose
it's what you meant when you said that there were sides to the question
that I didn't see. You said it, too, papa. I wish you had spoken more
plainly."

"We talked it over, Miss Guion. We didn't want to seem to force you.
It's the kind of thing that's better done when it's done of one's own
impulse. We were sure you'd come to it. All the same, if you hadn't done
it to-day, we'd made up our minds to--to suggest it. That's why I took
the liberty of bringing these things. Those are bonds that you've got
your hand on--and the checks make up the sum total."

By an instinctive movement she snatched her fingers away; but,
recovering herself, she took the package deliberately into her hands and
stood holding it.

"I've been explaining to Davenant," Guion said, in a muffled voice,
"that things aren't quite so hopeless as they seem. If we ever come into
Aunt Vic's money--"

"But there's no certainty of that, papa."

"No certainty, but a good deal of probability. She's always given us to
understand that the money wouldn't go out of her own family; and there's
practically no one left now but you and me. And if it _should_ come to
us, there'd be more than enough to--to square everything. You'd do it,
dear, wouldn't you, if Aunt Vic were to leave the whole thing to you? I
think she's as likely to do that as not."

"Mr. Davenant must know already that I shall give my whole life to
trying to pay our debt. If there's anything I could sign at once--"

Davenant moved from the fireside. "There's nothing to sign, Miss Guion,"
he said, briefly. "The matter is ended as far as I'm concerned. Mr.
Guion has got the money, and is relieved from his most pressing
embarrassments. That's all I care about. There's no reason why we should
ever speak of it again. If you'll excuse me now--"

He turned toward the couch with his hand outstretched, but during the
minute or two in which Olivia and he had been facing each other Guion
had drawn the rug over his face. Beneath it there was a convulsive
shaking, from which the younger man turned away. With a nod of
comprehension to Olivia he tiptoed softly from the room. As he did so he
could see her kneel beside the couch and kiss the hand that lay outside
the coverlet.

She overtook him, however, when he was downstairs picking up his hat and
stick from the hall table.

She stood on the lowest step of the stairs, leaning on the low, white
pillar that finished the balustrade. He was obliged to pass her on his
way to the door. The minute was the more awkward for him owing to the
fact that she did not take the initiative in carrying it off. On the
contrary, she made it harder by looking at him gravely without speaking.

"It's relief," he said, nodding with understanding toward the room
up-stairs. "I've seen men do that before--after they'd been facing some
danger or other with tremendous pluck."

He spoke for the sake of saying something, standing before her with his
hat and stick in his hand, not seeing precisely how he was to get away.

"It's a relief to me, too," she said, simply. "You can't imagine what
it's been the last few days--seeing things go to pieces like that. Now,
I suppose, they'll hold together somehow, though it can't be very well.
I dare say you think me all wrong--"

He shook his head.

"I couldn't see any other way. When you've done wrong as we've done it,
you'd rather be punished. You don't want to go scot-free. It's something
like the kind of impulse that made the hermits and ascetics submit to
scourging. But it's quite possible that I shouldn't have had the courage
to go through with it--especially if papa had broken down. As you said
from the first, I didn't see what was truly vital."

"I shouldn't blame myself too much for that, Miss Guion. It often
happens that one only finds the right way by making two or three plunges
into wrong ones."

"Do you think I've found it now?"

There was something wistful in the question, and not a little humble,
that induced him to say with fervor, "I'm very sure of it."

"And you?" she asked. "Is it the right way for you?"

"Yes; and it's the first time I've ever struck it."

She shook her head slowly. "I don't know. I'm a little bewildered. This
morning everything seemed so clear, and now--I understand," she went on,
"that we shall be taking all you have."

"Who told you that?" he asked, sharply.

"It doesn't matter who told me; but it's very important if we are. _Are_
we?"

He threw his head back in a way that, notwithstanding her preoccupation,
she could not but admire. "No; because I've still got my credit. When a
man has that--"

"But you'll have to begin all over again, sha'n't you?"

"Only as a man who has won one battle begins all over again when he
fights another. It's nothing but fun when you're fond of war."

"Didn't I do something very rude to you--once--a long time ago?"

The question took him so entirely unawares that, in the slight,
involuntary movement he made, he seemed to himself to stagger backward.
He was aware of looking blank, while unable to control his features to a
non-committal expression. He had the feeling that minutes had gone by
before he was able to say:

"It was really of no consequence--"

"Don't say that. It was of great consequence. Any one can see that--now.
I was insolent. I knew I _had_ been. You must have been perfectly aware
of it all these years; and--I _will_ say it!--I _must_ say it!--you're
taking your revenge--very nobly."

He was about to utter something in protest, but she turned away abruptly
and sped up the stairs. On the first landing she paused for the briefest
instant and looked down.

"Good-by," she faltered. "I must go back to papa. He'll need me. I can't
talk any more just now. I'm too bewildered--about everything. Colonel
Ashley will arrive in a day or two, and after I've seen him I shall be a
little clearer as to what I think; and--and then--I shall see you
again."

He continued to stand gazing up the stairway long after he had heard her
close the door of Guion's room behind her.




XI


It was not difficult for Davenant to ascribe his lightness of heart, on
leaving Tory Hill, to satisfaction in getting rid of his superfluous
money, since he had some reason to fear that the possession of it was no
great blessing. To a man with little instinct for luxury and no spending
tastes, twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year was an income far
outstripping his needs. It was not, however, in excess of his desires,
for he would gladly have set up an establishment and cut a dash if he
had known how. He admired the grand style in living, not so much as a
matter of display, because presumably it stood for all sorts of
mysterious refinements for which he possessed the yearning without the
initiation. The highest flight he could take by his own unaided efforts
was in engaging the best suite of rooms in the best hotel, when he was
quite content with his dingy old lodgings; in driving in taxicabs, when
the tram-car would have suited him just as well, and ordering champagne,
when he would have preferred some commoner beverage. Fully aware of the
insufficiency of this method of reaching a higher standard, he practised
it only because it offered the readiest means he could find of
straining upward. He was sure that with a wife who knew the arts of
elegance to lead the way his scent for following would be keen enough;
but between him and the acquisition of this treasure there lay the
memory of the haughty young creature who had, in the metaphor with which
he was most familiar, "turned him down."

But it was not the fact that he had more money than he needed of which
he was afraid; it was rather the perception that the possibility of
indulging himself--coupled with what he conceived to be a kind of duty
in doing it--was sapping his vigor. All through the second year of his
holiday he had noticed in himself the tendency of the big,
strong-fibered animal to be indolent and overfed. On the principle laid
down by Emerson that every man is as lazy as he dares to be he got into
the way of sleeping late, of lounging in the public places of hotels,
and smoking too many cigars. With a little encouragement he could have
contracted the incessant cocktail and Scotch-and-soda habits of some of
his traveling compatriots.

He excused these weaknesses on the ground that when he had returned to
Boston, and got back to his ordinary round of work and exercise, they
would vanish, without having to be overcome; and yet the nearer he drew
to his old home, the less impulse he felt for exertion. He found himself
asking the question, "Why should I try to make more money when I've got
enough already?" to which the only reply was in that vague hope of
"doing a little good," inspired by his visit to the scene of his
parents' work at Hankow. In this direction, however, his aptitudes were
no more spontaneous than they were for the life of cultivated taste.
Henry Guion's need struck him, therefore, as an opportunity. If he took
other views of it besides, if it made to him an appeal totally different
from the altruistic, he was able to conceal the fact--from himself, at
any rate--in the depths of a soul where much that was vital to the man
was always held in subliminal darkness. It disturbed him, then, to have
Drusilla Fane rifle this sanctuary with irreverent persistency, dragging
to light what he had kept scrupulously hidden away.

Having found her alone in the drawing-room drinking her tea, he told her
at once what he had accomplished in the way of averting the worst phase
of the danger hanging over the master of Tory Hill. He told her, too,
with some amount of elation, which he explained as his glee in getting
himself down to "hard-pan." Drusilla allowed the explanation to pass
till she had thanked him ecstatically for what he had done.

"Really, Peter, men are fine! The minute I heard Cousin Henry's wretched
story I knew the worst couldn't come to the worst, with you here. I only
wish you could realize what it means to have a big, strong man like you
to lean on."

Davenant looked pleased; he was in the mood to be pleased with anything.
He had had so little of women's appreciation in his life that Drusilla's
enthusiasm was not only agreeable but new. He noticed, too, that in
speaking Drusilla herself was at her best. She had never been pretty.
Her mouth was too large, her cheek-bones too high, and her skin too
sallow for that; but she had the charm of frankness and intelligence.

Davenant said what was necessary in depreciation of his act, going on to
explain the benefit he would reap by being obliged to go to work again.
He enlarged on his plans for taking his old rooms and his old office,
and informed her that he knew a fellow, an old pal, who had already let
him into a good thing in the way of a copper-mine in the region of Lake
Superior. Drusilla listened with interest till she found an opportunity
to say:

"I'm so glad that _is_ your reason for helping Cousin Henry, Peter;
because I was afraid there might be--another."

He stopped abruptly, looking dashed. Unaccustomed to light methods of
attack and defense, it took him a few seconds to see Drusilla's move.

"You thought I might be--in love?"

She nodded.

"That's queer," he went on, "because I'd got the same impression about
you."

It was Drusilla's turn to be aghast. She was a little surprised at not
being offended, too.

"What made you think that?" she managed to ask, after getting command of
herself.

"What makes one think anything? However," he conceded, "I dare say I'm
wrong."

"That's a very good conclusion to come to. I advise you to keep to it."

"I will if you'll do the same about me."

She seized the opening to carry the attack back in his direction.

"I can't make a bargain of that kind, Peter. The scientific mind bases
its conclusions on--observed phenomena."

"Which I guess is the reason why the scientific mind is so often wrong.
I've had a good deal to do with it in the copper-mine business. It's
always barking up the wrong tree. I've often heard it said that the
clever scientist is generally a poor reasoner."

"Well, perhaps he is. But I wasn't reasoning. I was merely going by
instinct when I thought you might have a special motive for helping
Cousin Henry. If you had, you know, it wouldn't be any harm."

"It mightn't be any harm; but would it be any good?"

"Well, that might depend a good deal--on you."

"On me? How so? I don't know what you're driving at."

"I'm not driving at anything. I'm only speculating. I'm wondering what I
should do if I were in your place--with all your advantages."

"Rot, Drusilla!"

"If I were a man and had a rival," Drusilla persisted, "I should be
awfully honorable in the stand I'd take toward him--just like you. But
if anything miscarried--"

"You don't _expect_ anything to miscarry?"

She shook her head. "No; I don't expect it. But it might be a fortunate
thing if it did."

"You don't mean to infer that this man Ashley mightn't come up to the
scratch?"

"Colonel Ashley has come up to a good many scratches in his time. He's
not likely to fail in this one."

"Well, then, what more is there to it?"

"There's a good deal more. There are things I can't explain, and which
you wouldn't understand if I did. Coming up to the scratch isn't
everything. Charles the First came up to the scratch when he walked up
and had his head cut off; but there was more to be said."

"And you mean that your Colonel Ashley would be brave enough to walk up
and have _his_ head cut off?"

"I know he'd be brave enough. It's no question of courage. He had the
Victoria Cross before he was thirty. But it's a noble head; and it might
be a pity it should have to fall."

"But I don't understand why it should."

"No, you wouldn't unless you'd lived among them. They'd all admit he had
done the right thing. They'd say that, having come out here to marry
her, he could do no less than go through with it. That part of it would
be all right. Even in the Rangers it might make comparatively little
difference--except that now and then Olivia would feel uncomfortable.
Only when he was mentioned at the Horse Guards for some important
command they'd remember that there was something queer--something
shady--about his wife's family, and his name would be passed over."

He nodded thoughtfully. "I see."

"Oh no, you don't. It's much too intricate for you to see. You couldn't
begin to understand how poignant it might become, especially for her,
without knowing their ways and traditions--"

He jumped to his feet. "Their ways and traditions be--!"

"Yes; that's all very fine. But they're very good ways, Peter. They've
got to keep the honor of the Service up to a very high standard. Their
ways are all right. But that doesn't keep them from being terrible
forces to come up against, especially for a proud thing like her. And
now that the postponing of the wedding has got into the papers--"

"Yes; I've seen 'em. Got it pretty straight, too, all things
considered."

"And that sort of thing simply flies. It will be in the New York papers
to-morrow, and in the London ones the day after. We always get those
things cabled over there. We know about the elopements and the queer
things that happen in America when we don't hear of anything else.
Within forty-eight hours they'll be talking of it at the Rangers' dépôt
in Sussex--and at Heneage--and all through his county--and at the Horse
Guards. You see if they aren't! You've no idea how people have their eye
on him. And when they hear the wedding has been put off for a scandal
they'll have at their heels all the men who've hated him--and all the
women who've envied her--"

He leaned his shoulders against the mantelpiece, his hands behind his
back. "Pooh! That sort of dog can only bark."

"No; that's where you're wrong, Peter. In England it can bite. It can
raise a to-do around their name that will put a dead stop to his
promotion--that is, the best kind of promotion, such as he's on the way
to."

"The deuce take his promotion! Let's think of--_her_."

"That's just what I thought you'd do, Peter; and with all your
advantages--"

"Drop that, Drusilla," he commanded. "You know you don't mean it. You
know as well as I do that I haven't a chance--even if I wanted
one--which I don't. You're not thinking of me--or of her. You're
thinking of him--and how to get him out of a match that won't tend to
his advancement."

"I'm thinking of every one, Peter--of every one but myself, that is. I'm
thinking of him, and her, and you--"

"Then you'll do me a favor if you leave me out."

She sprang to her feet, her little figure looking slim and girlish.

"I can't leave you out, Peter, when you're the Hamlet of the piece.
That's nonsense. I'm not plotting or planning on any one's behalf. It
isn't my temperament. I only say that if this--this affair--didn't come
off--though I suppose it will--I feel sure it will--yet if it
didn't--then, with all your advantages--and after what you've done for
her--"

He strode forward, almost upsetting the tea-table beside which she
stood. "Look here, Drusilla. You may as well understand me once for all.
I wouldn't marry a girl who took me because of what I'd done for her,
not if she was the last woman in the world."

"But you would if she was the first, Peter. And I'm convinced that for
you she _is_ the first--"

"Now, now!" he warned her, "that'll do! I've been generous enough not
to say anything as to who's first with you, though you don't take much
pains to hide it. Why not--?"

"You're all first with me," she protested. "I don't know which of you
I'm the most sorry for."

"Don't waste your pity on me. I'm perfectly happy. There's only one of
the lot who needs any consideration whatever. And, by God! if he's not
true to her, I'll--"

"Your intervention won't be called for, Peter," she assured him, making
her way toward the door. "You're greatly mistaken if you think I've
asked for it."

"Then for Heaven's sake what _have_ you asked for? _I_ don't see."

She was in the hall, but she turned and spoke through the doorway. "I've
only asked you not to be an idiot. I merely beg, for all our sakes, that
if something precious is flung down at your feet you'll have the common
sense to stoop and pick it up."

"I'll consider that," he called after her, as she sped up the stairs,
"when I see it lying there."




XII


It may be admitted at once that, on arriving at Tory Hill and hearing
from Olivia's lips the tale of her father's downfall, Colonel Rupert
Ashley received the first perceptible check in a very distinguished
career. Up to this point the sobriquet of "Lucky Ashley," by which he
was often spoken of in the Rangers, had been justified by more than one
spectacular success. He had fulfilled so many special missions to
uncivilized and half-civilized and queerly civilized tribes that he had
come to feel as if he habitually went on his way with the might of the
British Empire to back him. It was he who in South Africa brought the
M'popos to order without shedding a drop of blood; it was he who in the
eastern Soudan induced the followers of the Black Prophet to throw in
their lot with the English, securing by this move the safety of Upper
Egypt; it was he who in the Malay Peninsula intimidated the Sultan of
Surak into accepting the British protectorate, thus removing a menace to
the peace of the Straits Settlements. Even if he had had no other
exploits to his credit, these alone would have assured his favor with
the home authorities. It had become something like a habit, at the
Colonial Office or the War Officer or the Foreign Office, as the case
might be, whenever there was trouble on one of the Empire's vague outer
frontiers, to ask, "Where's Ashley?" Wherever he was, at Gibraltar or
Simla or Cairo or at the Rangers' dépôt in Sussex, he was sent for and
consulted. Once having gained a reputation for skill in handling
barbaric potentates, he knew how to make the most of it, both abroad and
in Whitehall. On rejoining his regiment, too, after some of his
triumphant expeditions, he was careful to bear himself with a modesty
that took the point from detraction, assuring, as it did, his
brother-officers that they would have done as well as he, had they
enjoyed the same chances.

He was not without a policy in this, since from the day of receiving his
commission he had combined a genuine love of his profession with a quite
laudable intention to "get on." He cherished this ambition more
naturally, perhaps, than most of his comrades, who took the profession
of arms lightly, for the reason that the instinct for it might be said
to be in his blood. The Ashleys were not an old county family. Indeed,
it was only a generation or so since they had achieved county rank. It
was a fact not generally remembered at the present day that the
grandfather of the colonel of the Sussex Rangers had been a successful
and estimable manufacturer of brushes. In the early days of Queen
Victoria he owned a much-frequented emporium in Regent Street, at which
you could get anything in the line from a tooth-brush to a currycomb.
Retiring from business in the fifties, with a considerable fortune for
the time, this Mr. Ashley had purchased Heneage from the impoverished
representatives of the Umfravilles. As luck would have it, the new
owners found a not unattractive Miss Umfraville almost going with the
place, since she lived in select but inexpensive lodgings in the
village. Her manners being as gentle as her blood, and her face even
gentler than either, if such a thing could be, it was in keeping with
the spirit that had borne the Ashleys along to look upon her as an
opportunity. Young Mr. Ashley, to whom his father had been able to give
the advantages of Oxford, knew at a glance that with this lady at his
side recognition by the county would be assured. Being indifferent to
recognition by the county except in so far as it expressed a phase of
advancement, and superior to calculation as a motive for the matrimonial
state, young Ashley proceeded with all due formality to fall in love;
and it was from the passion incidental to this episode that Lucky Ashley
was born.

All this had happened so long ago, according to modern methods of
reckoning, that the county had already forgotten what it was the
original Ashley had manufactured, or that he had manufactured anything
at all. By the younger generation it was assumed that Heneage had passed
to the Ashley family through intermarriage with the Umfravilles. Certain
it was that the Ashleys maintained the Umfraville tradition and used the
Umfraville arms. What chiefly survived of the spirit that had made the
manufacture of brushes so lucrative a trade was the intention young
Rupert Ashley took with him into the army--to get on.

He had got on. Every one spoke of him nowadays as a coming man. It was
conceded that when generals like Lord Englemere or Lord Bannockburn
passed away, it would be to such men as Rupert Ashley--the number of
them could be counted on the fingers of your two hands!--that the
country would look for its defenders. They were young men,
comparatively, as yet; but they were waiting and in training. It was a
national asset to know that they were there.

It was natural, then, that Ashley's eyes should be turning in the
direction of the great appointments. He had won so much distinction in
the Jakh War and the Dargal War that there was nothing to which, with
time, he could not aspire. True, he had rivals; true, there were men who
could supplant him without putting any great strain upon their powers;
true, there were others with more family influence, especially of that
petticoat influence which had been known to carry so much weight in high
and authoritative quarters; but he had confidence in himself, in his
ability, his star--the last named of which had the merit of always
seeming to move forward.

Everything began to point, therefore, to his marrying. In a measure it
was part of his qualification for high command. He had reached that
stage in his development, both private and professional, at which the
co-operation of a good and graceful wife would double his capacity for
public service, besides giving him that domestic consolation of which
he began to feel the need. There were posts he could think of--posts
that would naturally be vacant before many years were past--in which the
fact of his being unmarried would be a serious drawback if his name were
to come up. Better to be unmarried than to be saddled with a wife who
from any deficiency of birth or manner was below the level of her
station! Of course! He had seen more than one man, splendidly qualified
otherwise, passed over because of that mischance. But with a wife who in
her way was equal to him in his they would both go far. Who could
venture to say how far?

In this respect he was fortunate in knowing exactly what he wanted. That
is, he had seen enough of the duties of high position to be critical of
the ladies who performed them. Experience enabled him to create his
ideal by a process of elimination. Many a time, as he watched some great
general's wife--Lady Englemere, let us say, or Lady Bannockburn--receive
her guests, he said to himself, "That is exactly what my wife shall not
be." She should not be a military intrigante like the one, nor a female
martinet like the other, nor a gambler like a third, nor a snob like a
fourth, nor a fool about young men like several he could think of. By
dint of fastidious observation and careful rejection of the qualities of
which he disapproved, a vision rose before him of the woman who would be
the complement of himself. He saw her clever, spirited, high-bred--a
woman of the world, familiar with literature and arts, and speaking at
least one language besides her mother-tongue. In dress she should be
exquisite, in conversation tactful, in manner sympathetic. As mistress
of the house she should be thorough; as a hostess, full of charm; as a
mother--but his imagination hardly went into that. That she should be a
perfect mother he took for granted, just as he took it for granted that
she should be beautiful. A woman who had the qualifications he desired
could not be less than beautiful from the sheer operation of the soul.

Considering how definite his ideas were--and moderate, on the whole--it
surprised him to find no one to embody them. It sometimes seemed to him
that the traditional race of Englishwomen had become extinct. Those he
met were either brilliant and hard, or handsome and horsey, or athletic
and weedy, or smart and selfish, or pretty and silly, or sweet and
provincial, or good and grotesque. With the best will in the world to
fall in love, he found little or no temptation. Indeed, he had begun to
think that the type of woman on whom he had set his heart was, like some
article of an antiquated fashion, no longer produced when unexpectedly
he saw her.

He saw her unexpectedly, because it was at church; and whatever his
motives on that bright Sunday morning in May in attending the old
garrison chapel in Southsea, the hope of seeing his vision realized was
not one. If, apart from the reasons for which people are supposed to go
to church, he had any special thought, it was that of meeting Mrs. Fane.
It had happened two or three times already that, having perceived her at
the service, he had joined her on the Common afterward, and she had
asked him home to lunch. They had been pleasant little luncheons--so
pleasant that he almost regretted the fact that she was an American. He
had nothing against Americans in themselves. He knew a number of their
women who had married into one arm or another of the Service with
conspicuous advantage to their husbands. That, in fact, was part of the
trouble. There were so many of them nowadays that he had begun to feel
vaguely that where there was question of high position--and he hoped
modestly that in his case there was distinctly question of that--it was
time the principle was being established of England for the English.
Nevertheless, he had got so far in his consideration of Drusilla Fane as
to ask himself whether she was not, as the widow of a British officer,
an Englishwoman to all intents and purposes as well as in the strict
letter of the law. He could not say that he was in love with her; but
neither could he say that one of these days he might not be. If he ever
were it would certainly be on the principle of _faute de mieux_; but
many a man has chosen his wife on no better ground than that.

Such criticism as he had to make to her disadvantage he could form there
and then in the chapel while they were reading the lessons or chanting
the psalms. She sat two or three rows in front of him, on the other side
of the aisle. There was something about Drusilla in church that
suggested a fish out of water. He had noticed it before. She was
restless, inattentive; she kept turning her head to see who was behind
her or at the other end of the pew; she rarely found the places in the
prayer-book or knew just when to kneel down; when she did kneel down she
sank into an awkward little bunch; every now and then she stifled, or
did not stifle, a yawn.

Ashley had a theory that manner in church is the supreme test of the
proprieties. He knew plenty of women who could charm at a dinner or
dazzle at a dance, but who displayed their weaknesses at prayer. All
unwitting to herself, poor Drusilla was inviting his final--or almost
final--judgment on her future, so far at least as he was concerned, for
the simple reason that she twitched and sighed and forgot to say the
Amens.

And just then his eyes traveled to her neighbor--a tall young lady,
dressed in white, with no color in her costume but a sash of hues
trembling between sea-green and lilac. She was slender and graceful,
with that air at once exquisite and unassuming that he had seen in the
Englishwoman of his dreams. Though he could get no more than a side
glimpse of her face, he divined that it was pure and that it must be
thrown into relief by the heavy coil of coppery-brown hair. But what he
noticed in her first was that which he thought of concerning other women
last--a something holy and withdrawn, a quality of devotion without
which he had no conception of real womanhood. It seemed to be a matter
of high courtesy with her not to perceive that the choir-boys sang out
of tune or that the sermon was prosy. In the matter of kneeling he had
seen only one woman in his life--and she the highest in the land--who
did it with this marvelous grace at once dignified and humble. "It takes
old England," he said to himself, gloatingly, "to make 'em like
that--simple and--_stunning_."

But on the Common after service, and at luncheon after that, and during
the three or four weeks that ensued, he had much to do in reforming his
opinions. There were several facts about Olivia Guion that disorientated
his points of view and set him looking for new ones. Though he was not
wholly successful in finding them, he managed, nevertheless, to justify
himself for falling in love in violation of his principles. He admitted
that he would have preferred to marry a compatriot of his own, and some
one above the rank of a solicitor's daughter; but, since he had
discovered the loveliest and noblest creature in the world, it was idle
to cavil because one land or one situation in life rather than another
had produced her. As well complain of the rubies and pearls that deck
the English crown because some were found in Tibetan mountains and
others in Indian seas. There are treasures, he argued, so precious as to
transcend all merely national limitations, making them petty and
irrelevant. The one thing to the point was that in Olivia Guion he had
won the human counterpart of himself, who could reflect his qualities
and complete them.

       *       *       *       *       *

He had been so proud that the blow on receiving Olivia's letter in New
York was a cruel one. Though it told him nothing but that her father had
lost all his money and that the invitations to the wedding had been
withdrawn, this in itself was immeasurably distressing to a man with a
taste for calling public attention to his movements and who liked to see
what concerned him march with a certain pomp. His marriage being an
event worthy to take place in sight of the world, he had not only found
ways of making it a topic of interest before leaving England, but he had
summoned to it such friends of distinction as he possessed on the
American side of the water. Though he had not succeeded in getting the
British Ambassador, Benyon, the military attaché at Washington, was to
come with his wife, and Lord Woolwich, who was aide-de-camp at Ottawa,
had promised to act as best man. His humiliation on speculating as to
what they must have said when they received Olivia's card announcing
that the marriage was not to take place on the 28th was such that he
fell to wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to bluff the loss
of money. They might have carried out their plans in spite of it. Indeed
he felt the feasibility of this course the more strongly after he had
actually seen Olivia and she had given him the outlines of her tale.

Watching his countenance closely, she saw that he blanched. Otherwise he
betrayed no sign of flinching. His manner of sitting rigid and upright
in his corner of the rustic seat was a perfectly natural way of
listening to a story that affected him so closely. What distressed her
chiefly was the incongruity between his personality and the sordid drama
in which she was inviting him to take part. He was even more
distinguished-looking than he appeared in the photographs she cherished
or in the vision she had retained in her memory. Without being above the
medium male height, he was admirably shaped by war, sport, and exercise.
His neat head, with its thick, crispy hair, in which there was already a
streak of gray, was set on his shoulders at just the right poise for
command. The high-bridged nose, inherited from the Umfravilles, was of
the kind commonly considered to show "race." The eyes had the sharpness,
and the thin-lipped mouth the inflexibility, that go with a capacity for
quick decisions. While he was not so imposing in mufti as in his
uniform, the trim traveling-suit of russet brown went well with the
bronze tint of the complexion. It was so healthy a bronze, as a usual
thing, that his present pallor was the more ashen from contrast.

Knowing from his telegram the hour at which to expect him, she had gone
down the driveway to meet him when she saw him dismiss his taxicab at
the gate. She chose to do this in order that their first encounter might
take place out-of-doors. With the windows of the neighboring houses open
and people sitting on verandas or passing up and down the road, they
could exchange no more than some conventional greeting. She would assume
nothing on the ground of their past standing toward each other. He
seemed to acquiesce in this, since he showed no impatience at being
restricted to the formality of shaking hands.

Happily for both, commonplace words were given them--questions and
answers as to his voyage, his landing, his hotel. He came to her relief,
too, as they sauntered toward the house, by commenting on its dignity
and Georgian air, as well as by turning once or twice to look at the
view. Nearing the steps she swerved from the graveled driveway and began
to cross the lawn.

"We won't go in just yet," she explained. "Papa is there. He felt he
ought to dress and come downstairs to receive you. He's very far from
well. I hope you'll do your best not to--to think of him too harshly."

"I shouldn't think harshly of any one simply because he'd had business
bad luck."

"He _has_ had business bad luck--but that isn't all. We'll sit here."

Taking one corner of a long garden-seat that stood in the shade of an
elm, she signed to him to take the other. On the left they had the
Corinthian-columned portico of the garden front of the house; in the
distance, the multicolored slopes of the town. Olivia, at least, felt
the stimulating effect of the, golden forenoon sunshine.

As for Ashley, in spite of his outward self-possession, he was too
bewildered to feel anything at all. Having rushed on from New York by
night, he was now getting his first daylight glimpse of America; and,
though, owing to more urgent subjects for, thought, he was not
consciously giving his attention to things outward, he had an oppressive
sense of immensity and strangeness. The arch of the sky was so sweeping,
the prospect before them so gorgeous, the sunlight so hard, and the
distances so clear! For the first time in his life a new continent
aroused in him an odd sense of antagonism. He had never had it in Africa
or Asia or in the isles of the Southern Sea. There he had always gone
with a sense of power, with the instinct of the conqueror; while
here.... But Olivia was speaking, saying things too appalling for
immediate comprehension.

Her voice was gentle and even; she spoke with a certain kind of ease.
She appeared to rehearse something already learned by heart.

"So, you see, he didn't merely lose his own money; he lost theirs--the
money of his clients--which was in his trust. I hadn't heard of it when
I wrote you in New York, otherwise I should have told you. But now that
you know it--"

He looked mystified. "He's jolly lucky not to be in England," he said,
trying not to seem as stunned as he felt. "There that sort of thing is a
very serious--"

"Offence," she hastened to say. "Oh, so it is here. I must tell you
quite plainly that if the money hadn't come papa would have had to go
to--"

"But the money did come?"

She made a point of finishing her sentence. "If the money hadn't come
papa would have had to go to prison. Yes, the money did come. A friend
of--of papa's--and Drusilla's--advanced it. It's been paid over to the
people who were going to law."

"So that part of it is settled?"

"That part of it is settled to the extent that no action will be taken
against papa."

She continued to talk on gently, evenly, giving him the facts
unsparingly. It was the only way. Her very statements, so it seemed to
her, implied that as marriage between them was no longer possible their
engagement was at an end.

She was not surprised that he scarcely noticed when, having said all she
had to say, she ceased speaking. Taking it for granted that he was
thinking out the most merciful way of putting his verdict into words,
she, too, remained silent. She was not impatient, nor uneasy, nor
alarmed. The fact that the business of telling him was no longer ahead
of her, that she had got it over, brought so much relief that she felt
able to await his pleasure.

She mistook, however, the nature of his thoughts. Once he had grasped
the gist of her information, he paid little attention to its details.
The important thing was his own conduct. Amid circumstances
overwhelmingly difficult he must act so that every one, friend or rival,
relative, county magnate or brother officer, the man in his regiment or
the member of his club, the critic in England or the onlooker in
America, should say he had done precisely the right thing.

He used the words "precisely the right thing" because they formed a
ruling phrase in his career. For twenty-odd years they had been written
on the tablets of his heart and worn as frontlets between his brows.
They had first been used in connection with him by a great dowager
countess now deceased. She had said to his mother, apropos of some
forgotten bit of courtliness on his part, "You can always be sure that
Rupert will do precisely the right thing." Though he was but a lad at
Eton at the time, he had been so proud of this opinion, expressed with
all a dowager countess's authority, that from the moment it was repeated
to him by his mother he made it a device. It had kept him out of more
scrapes than he could reckon up, and had even inspired the act that
would make his name glorious as long as there were annals of the
Victoria Cross.

He had long been persuaded that had the dowager countess not thus given
the note to his character his record would never have been written on
that roll of heroes. "I should have funked it," was his way of putting
it, by which he meant that he would have funked it through sheer
ignorance of himself and of his aptitude for the high and noble. It was
an aptitude that flourished best under an appreciative eye--of the
dowager countess looking down from heaven--or of the discerning here on
earth--as an actor is encouraged by a sympathetic public to his highest
histrionic efforts. If there was anything histrionic in Ashley himself,
it was only in the sense that he was at his finest when, actually or
potentially, there was some one there to see. He had powers then of
doing precisely the right thing which in solitude might have been
dormant from lack of motive.

It was undoubtedly because he felt the long-sighted eyes of England on
him that he had done precisely the right thing in winning the Victoria
Cross. He confessed this--to himself. He confessed it often--every time,
in fact, when he came to a difficult passage in his life. It was his
strength, his inspiration. He confessed it now. If he sat silent while
Olivia Guion waited till it seemed good to him to speak, it was only
that he might remind himself of the advantages of doing the right thing,
however hard. He had tested those advantages time and time again. The
very memories they raised were a rebuke to weakness and hesitation. If
he ever had duties he was inclined to shirk, he thought of that
half-hour which had forever set the seal upon his reputation as a
British soldier.

He thought of it now. He saw himself again looking up at the bristling
cliffs that were to be rushed, whence the Afridis were pouring their
deadly fire. He saw himself measuring with his eye the saddle of
precipitous slope that had to be crossed, devoid of cover and strewn
with the bodies of dead Ghurkas. Of the actual crossing, with sixty
Rangers behind him, he had little or no recollection. He had passed
under the hail of bullets as through perils in a dream. As in a dream,
too, he remembered seeing his men, when he turned to cheer them on, go
down like nine-pins--throwing up their arms and staggering, or twisting
themselves up like convulsive cats. It was grotesque rather than
horrible; he felt himself grinning inwardly, as at something hellishly
comic, when he reached the group of Ghurkas huddled under the cavernous
shelter of the cliff. Then, just as he threw himself on the ground,
panting like a spent dog and feeling his body all over to know whether
or not he had been wounded, he saw poor Private Vickerson out in the
open, thirty yards from the protection of the wall of rock. While the
other Rangers to a man were lying still, on the back with the knees
drawn up, or face downward, with the arms outstretched, or rolled on the
side as though they were in bed, Vickerson was rising on his hands and
dragging himself forward. It was one of Ashley's most vivid
recollections that Vickerson's movements were like a seal's. They had
the drollery of a bit of infernal mimicry. It was also a vivid
recollection that when he ran out to the soldier's aid he had his first
sensation of fear. The bullets whizzed so thick about him that he ran
back again. It was an involuntary running back, as involuntary as
snatching his fingers out of a fire. He could remember standing under
the rock, and, as Vickerson did not move, half hoping he were dead. That
would put an end to any further attempts to save him. But the soldier
stirred again, propping himself with both hands and pulling his body
onward for a few inches more. Again Ashley ran out into a tempest of
iron and fire and over ground slippery with blood. He could still feel
himself hopping back, as a barefooted boy who has ventured into a
snow-storm hops back into the house. A third time he ran out, and a
fourth. At the fourth he distinctly worded the thought which had been at
the back of his mind from the beginning, "I shall get the V.C. for
this." He tried to banish the unworthy suggestion, but it was too strong
for him. Over the cliffs, and out of the clouds, and from beyond the
horizon, he felt the unseen eyes of England upon him, inciting him to
such a valor that at the fifth attempt he dragged in his man.

He came out of this reverie, which, after all, was brief, to find the
gentle tones in which Olivia had made her astounding revelations still
in his ears; while she herself sat expectant, and resigned. He knew she
was expectant and resigned and that she had braced her courage for the
worst. With many men, with most men, to do so would have been needful.
In the confusion of his rapid summaries and calculations it was a
pleasurable thought that she should learn from him, and through him and
in him, that it was not so with all. The silence which at first was
inadvertent now became deliberate as--while he noted with satisfaction
that he had not overstated to himself the exquisite, restrained beauty
of her features, her eyes, her hair, her hands, and of the very texture
and fashion of her clothing--he prolonged the suspense which was to be
the prelude to his justifying once again the dowager countess's good
opinion. It was to his credit as a brave man that he could nerve himself
for this with his eyes wide open--wider open than even Mrs. Fane's--to
to the consequences that might be in store for him.




XIII


Ashley had the tact, sprung of his English instinct for moderation, not
to express his good intentions too directly. He preferred to let them
filter out through a seemingly casual manner of taking them for granted.
Neither did he attempt to disguise the fact that the strangeness
incidental to meeting again, in trying conditions and under another sky,
created between himself and Olivia a kind of moral distance across which
they could draw together only by degrees. It was a comfort to her that
he did not try to bridge it by anything in the way of forced tenderness.
He was willing to talk over the situation simply and quietly until, in
the course of an hour or two, the sense of separation began to wear
away.

The necessity on her part of presenting Ashley to her father and
offering him lunch brought into play those social resources that were as
second nature to all three. It was difficult to think the bottom could
be out of life while going through a carefully chosen menu and drinking
an excellent vin de Graves at a table meticulously well appointed. To
escape the irony of this situation they took refuge in the topics that
came readiest, the novelty to Ashley of the outward aspect of American
things keeping them on safe ground till the meal was done. It was a
relief to both men that Guion could make his indisposition an excuse for
retiring again to his room.

It was a relief to Olivia, too. For the first time in her life she had
to recognize her father as insupportable to any one but herself and
Peter Davenant. Ashley did his best to conceal his repulsion; she was
sure of that; he only betrayed it negatively in a tendency to ignore
him. He neither spoke nor listened to him any more than he could help.
By keeping his eyes on Olivia he avoided looking toward him. The fact
that Guion took this aversion humbly, his head hanging and his attention
given to his plate, did not make it the less poignant.

All the same, as soon as they were alone in the dining-room the old
sense of intimacy, of belonging to each other, suddenly returned. It
returned apropos of nothing and with the exchange of a glance. There was
a flash in his eyes, a look of wonder in hers--and he had taken her, or
she had slipped, into his arms.

And yet when a little later he reverted to the topic of the morning and
said, "As things are now, I really don't see why we shouldn't be married
on the 28th--privately, you know," her answer was, "What did you think
of papa?"

Though he raised his eyebrows in surprise that she should introduce the
subject, he managed to say, "He seems pretty game."

"He does; but I dare say he isn't as game as he looks. There's a good
deal before him still."

"If we're married on the 28th he'd have one care the less."

"Because I should be taken off his hands. I'm afraid that's not the way
to look at it. The real fact is that he'd have nobody to help him."

"I've two months' leave. You could do a lot for him in that time."

She bent over her piece of work. It was the sofa-cushion she had laid
aside on the day when she learned from Davenant that her father's
troubles were like Jack Berrington's. They had come back for coffee to
the rustic seat on the lawn. For the cups and coffee service a small
table had been brought out beside which she sat. Ashley had so far
recovered his sang-froid as to be able to enjoy a cigar.

"Would you be very much hurt," she asked, without raising her head, "if
I begged you to go back to England without our being married at all?"

"Oh, but I say!"

The protest was not over-strong. He was neither shocked nor surprised. A
well-bred woman, finding herself in such trouble as hers, would
naturally offer him some way of escape from it.

"You see," she went on, "things are so complicated already that if we
got married we should complicate them more. There's so much to be
done--as to papa--and this house--and the future--of the kind of thing
you don't know anything about. They're sordid things, too, that you'd be
wasted on if you tried to learn them."

He smiled indulgently. "And so you're asking me--a soldier!--to run
away."

"No, to let me do it. It's so--so impossible that I can't face it."

"Oh, nonsense!" He spoke with kindly impatience. "Don't you love me? You
said just now--in the dining-room--when--"

"Yes, I know; I did say that. But, you see--we _must_ consider it--love
can't be the most important thing in the world for either you or me."

"I understand. You mean to say it's duty. Very good. In that case, my
duty is as plain as a pikestaff."

"Your duty to stand by me?"

"I should be a hound if I didn't do it."

"And I should feel myself a common adventuress if I were to let you."

"Oh--I say!"

His protest this time was more emphatic. There was even a pleading note
in it. In the course of two or three hours he had got back much of the
feeling he had had in England that she was more than an exquisite lady,
that she was the other part of himself. It seemed superfluous on her
part to fling open the way of retreat for him too wide.

She smiled at his exclamation. "Yes, I dare say that's how it strikes
you. But it's very serious to me. Isn't it serious to you, too, to feel
that you must be true to me--and marry me--after all that's come to
pass?"

"One doesn't think that way--or speak that way--of marrying the woman
one--adores."

"Men have been known to marry the women they adored, and still regret
the consequences they had to meet."

"She's right," he said to himself. "It _is_ serious."

There could be no question as to her wisdom in asking him to pause. At
his age and in his position, and with his merely normal capacity for
passion, it would be absurd to call the world well lost for love.
Notwithstanding his zeal to do the right thing, there was something due
to himself, and it was imperative that he should consider it. Dropping
the stump of his cigar into his empty coffee-cup, he got up and strode
away. The emotion of the minute, far in excess of the restrained phrases
convention taught them to use, offered an excuse for his
unceremoniousness.

He walked to the other side of the lawn, then down to the gate, then
round to the front of the house. To a chance passer-by he was merely
inspecting the premises. What he saw, however, was not the spectacular
foliage, nor the mellow Georgian dwelling, but himself going on his
familiar victorious way, freed from a clogging scandal that would make
the wheels of his triumphal car drive heavily. He saw himself advancing,
as he had advanced hitherto, from promotion to promotion, from command
to command. He saw himself first alone, and then with a wife--a wife who
was not Olivia Guion. Then suddenly the vision changed into something
misty and undefined; the road became dark, the triumphal car jolted and
fell to pieces; there was reproach in the air and discomfort in his
sensations. He recognized the familiar warnings that he was not doing
precisely the right thing. He saw Olivia Guion sitting as he had left
her four or five minutes before, her head bent over her stitching. He
saw her there, deserted, alone. He saw the eyes of England on him, as he
drove away in his triumphal car, leaving her to her fate. His
compunction was intense, his pity overwhelming. Merely at turning his
back on her to stroll around the lawn he felt guilty of a cowardly
abandonment. And he felt something else--he felt the clinging of her
arms around his neck; he felt the throb of her bosom against his own as
she let herself break down just for a second--just for a sob. It seemed
to him that he should feel that throb forever.

He hurried back to where he had left her. "It's no use," he said to
himself; "I'm in for it, by Jove. I simply can't leave her in the
lurch."

There was no formal correctness about Ashley's habitual speech. He kept,
as a rule, to the idiom of the mess, giving it distinction by his crisp,
agreeable enunciation.

Olivia had let the bit of embroidery rest idly in her lap. She looked up
at his approach. He stood before her.

"Do I understand," he asked, with a roughness assumed to conceal his
agitation, "that you're offering me my liberty?"

"No; that I'm asking you for mine."

"On what grounds?"

She arched her eyebrows, looking round about her comprehensively. "I
should think that was clear. On the grounds of--of everything."

"That's not enough. So long as you can't say that you don't--don't care
about me any more--"

There was that possibility. It was very faint, but if she made use of it
he should consider it decisive. Doing precisely the right thing would
become quite another course of action if her heart rejected him. But she
spoke promptly.

"I can't say that; but I can say something more important."

He nodded firmly. "That settles it, by Jove. I sha'n't give you up.
There's no reason for it. So long as we love each other--"

"Our loving each other wouldn't make your refusal any the less hard for
me. As your wife I should be trying to fill a position for which I'm no
longer qualified and in which I should be a failure."

"As my wife," he said, slowly, with significant deliberation, "we could
make the position anything you felt able to fill."

She considered this. "That is, you could send in your papers and retire
into private life."

"If we liked."

"So that you'd be choosing between your career--and me."

"I object to the way of putting it. If my career, as you call it, didn't
make you happy, you should have whatever would do the trick."

"I'm afraid you'll think me captious if I say that nothing _could do_
it. If you weren't happy, I couldn't be; and you'd never be happy except
as a soldier."

"That trade would be open to me whatever happened."

"In theory, yes; but in practice, if you had a wife who was under a
cloud you'd have to go under it, too. That's what it would come to in
the working-out."

She stood up from sheer inability to continue sitting still. The piece
of embroidery fell on the grass. Ashley smiled at her--a smile that was
not wholly forced, because of the thoughts with which she inspired him.
Her poise, her courage, the something in her that would have been pride
if it had not been nearer to meekness and which he had scarcely called
meekness before he felt it to be fortitude, gave him confidence in the
future. "She's stunning--by Jove!" It seemed to him that he saw her for
the first time. For the first time since he had known her he was less
the ambitious military officer seeking a wife who would grace a high
position than he was a man in love with a woman. Separating these two
elements within himself, he was able to value her qualities, not as
adornments to some Home or Colonial Headquarters House, but as of
supreme worth for their own sake. "People have only got to see her," he
said, inwardly, to which he added aloud:

"I dare say the cloud may not be so threatening, after all; and even if
it is, I should go under it with the pluckiest woman in the world."

She acknowledged this with a scarcely visible smile and a slight
inclination of the head. "Thank you; I'm foolish enough to like to hear
you say it. I think I _am_ plucky--alone. But I shouldn't be if I
involved anybody else."

"But if it was some one who could help you?"

"That might be different, but I don't know of any one who could. _You_
couldn't. If you tried you'd only injure yourself without doing me any
good."

"At the least, I could take you away from--from all this."

"No, because it's the sort of thing one can never leave behind. It's
gone ahead of us. It will meet us at every turn. You and I--and
papa--are probably by to-day a subject for gossip in half the clubs in
New York. To-morrow it will be the same thing in London--at the club you
call the Rag--and the Naval and Military--and your different Service
clubs--"

To hide the renewal of his dismay he pooh-poohed this possibility. "As a
mere nine days' wonder."

"Which isn't forgotten when the nine days are past. Long after they've
ceased speaking of it they'll remember--"

"They'll remember," he interrupted, fiercely, "that I jilted you."

She colored hotly. "That you--what?"

He colored, too. The words were as much a surprise to him as to her. He
had never thought of this view of the case till she herself summoned up
the vision of his friends and enemies discussing the affair in big
leather arm-chairs in big, ponderous rooms in Piccadilly or St. James's
Square. It was what they would say, of course. It was what he himself
would have said of any one else. He had a renewed feeling that retreat
was cut off.

"If we're not married--if I go home without you--it's what'll be on
everybody's lips."

"But it won't be true," she said, with a little gasp.

He laughed. "That won't matter. It's how it'll look."

"Oh, looks!"

"It's what we're talking about, isn't it? It's what makes the
difference. I shall figure as a cad."

He spoke as one who makes an astounding discovery. She was inexpressibly
shocked.

"Oh, but you couldn't," was all she could find to say, but she said it
with conviction.

[Illustration: "THERE'S NO ONE WHO WON'T BELIEVE BUT THAT I--THREW YOU
OVER."]

He laughed again. "You'll see. There's no one--not my best friends--not
my mother--not my sisters--who won't believe--whatever you and I may say
to the contrary--who won't believe but that I--threw you over."

A toss of his hand, a snap of his fingers, suited the action to the
word.

Her color came and went in little shifting flashes. She moved a pace or
two aimlessly, restively. Her head went high, her chin tilted. When she
spoke her voice trembled with indignation, but she only said:

"They couldn't believe it long."

"Oh, couldn't they! The story would follow me to my grave. Things like
that are never forgotten among fellows so intimate as soldiers. There
was a chap in our regiment who jilted a nice girl at the Cape--sailed
for home secretly only a week before the wedding." He paused to let her
take in the dastardly nature of the flight. "Well, he rejoined at the
dépôt. He stayed--but he didn't stay long. The Rangers got too hot for
him--or too cold. The last I ever heard of him he was giving English
lessons at Boulogne."

The flagrancy of the case gave her an advantage. "It's idle to think
that that kind of fate could overtake you."

"The fate that can overtake me easily enough is that as long as I live
they'll say I chucked a girl because she'd had bad luck."

She was about to reply when the click of the latch of the gate diverted
her attention. Drusilla Fane, attended by Davenant, was coming up the
hill. Seeing Olivia and Ashley at the end of the lawn, Drusilla
deflected her course across the grass, Davenant in her wake. Her wide,
frank smile was visible from a long way off.

"This is not indiscretion," she laughed, as she advanced; "neither is it
vulgar curiosity to see the lion. I shouldn't have come at all if mother
hadn't sent me with a message."

Wearing a large hat _à la_ Princesse de Lamballe and carrying a
long-handled sunshade which she held daintily, like a Watteau
shepherdess holding a crook, Drusilla had an air of refined,
eighteenth-century dash. Knowing the probability that she disturbed some
poignant bit of conversation, she proceeded to take command, stepping up
to Olivia with a hasty kiss. "Hello, you dear thing!" Turning to Ashley,
she surveyed him an instant before offering her hand. "So you've got
here! How fit you look! What sort of trip did you have, and how did you
leave your people? And, oh, by the way, this is Mr. Davenant."

Davenant, who had been paying his respects to Miss Guion, charged
forward, with hand outstretched and hearty: "Happy to meet you, Colonel.
Glad to welcome you to our country."

"Oh!"

Ashley snapped out the monosyllable in a dry, metallic voice pitched
higher than his usual key. The English softening of the vowel sound, so
droll to the American ear, was also more pronounced than was customary
in his speech, so that the exclamation became a sharp "A-ow!"

Feeling his greeting to have been insufficient, Davenant continued,
pumping up a forced rough-and-ready cordiality. "Heard so much about
you, Colonel, that you seem like an old friend. Hope you'll like us.
Hope you'll enjoy your stay."

"Oh, indeed? I don't know, I'm sure."

Ashley's glance shifted from Drusilla to Olivia as though asking in some
alarm who was this exuberant bumpkin in his Sunday clothes who had
dropped from nowhere. Davenant drew back; his face fell. He looked like
a big, sensitive dog hurt by a rebuff. It was Mrs. Fane who came to the
rescue.

"Peter's come to see Cousin Henry. They've got business to talk over.
And mother wants to know if you and Colonel Ashley won't come to dinner
to-morrow evening. That's my errand. Just ourselves, you know. It'll be
very quiet."

Olivia recovered somewhat from the agitation of the previous half-hour
as well as from the movement of sudden, inexplicable anger which
Ashley's reception of Davenant had produced in her. Even so she could
speak but coldly, and, as it were, from a long way off.

"You'll go," she said, turning to Ashley, "and I'll come if I can leave
papa. I'll run up flow and see how he is and take Mr. Davenant with me."




XIV


There was dignity in the way in which Davenant both withdrew and stood
his ground. He was near the Corinthian portico of the house as Olivia
approached him. Leaning on his stick, he looked loweringly back at
Ashley, who talked to Drusilla without noticing him further. Olivia
guessed that in Davenant's heart there was envy tinged with resentment,
antipathy, not tempered by a certain unwilling admiration. She wondered
what it was that made the difference between the two men, that gave
Ashley his very patent air of superiority. It was a superiority not in
looks, since Davenant was the taller and the handsomer; nor in clothes,
since Davenant was the better dressed; nor in the moral make-up, since
Davenant had given proofs of unlimited generosity. But there it was, a
tradition of self-assurance, a habit of command which in any company
that knew nothing about either would have made the Englishman easily
stand first.

Her flash of anger against the one in defense of the other passed away,
its place being taken by a feeling that astonished her quite as much.
She tried to think it no more than a pang of jealousy at seeing her own
countryman snubbed by a foreigner. She was familiar with the sensation
from her European, and especially her English, experiences. At an
unfriendly criticism it could be roused on behalf of a chance stranger
from Colorado or California, and was generally quite impersonal. She
told herself that it was impersonal now, that she would have had the
same impulse of protection, of championship, for any one.

Nevertheless, there was a tone in her voice as she joined him that
struck a new note in their acquaintanceship.

"I'm glad you came when you did. I wanted you to meet Colonel Ashley.
You'll like him when you know him better. Just at first he was a little
embarrassed. We'd been talking of things--"

"I didn't notice anything--that is, anything different from any other
Englishman."

"Yes; that's it, isn't it? Meeting an Englishman is often like the first
plunge into a cold bath--chilling at first, but delightful afterward."

He stopped under the portico, to say with a laugh that was not quite
spontaneous: "Yes; I dare say. But my experience is limited. I've never
got to the--afterward."

"Oh, well, you will," she said, encouragingly, "now that you know
Colonel Ashley."

"I've heard of men plunging into a cold bath and finding it so icy that
they've popped out again."

"Yes; thin-blooded men, who are sensitive to chills. Not men like you."

They entered the house, lingering in the oval sitting-room through
which they had to pass.

"Fortunately," he tried to say, lightly, "it doesn't matter in this case
whether I'm sensitive to chills or not."

"Oh, but it does. I want you two to be friends."

"What for?" The question was so point-blank as to be a little scornful,
but she ignored that.

"On Colonel Ashley's side, for what he'll gain in knowing you; on
yours--for something more."

He stopped again, at the foot of the staircase in the hall. "May I
ask--just what you mean by that?"

She hesitated. "It's something that a tactful person wouldn't tell. If I
do, it's only because I want you to consider me as--your friend. I know
you haven't hitherto," she hurried on, as he flushed and tried to speak.
"I haven't deserved it. But after what's happened--and after all you've
done for us--"

"I could consider you my friend without asking Colonel Ashley to think
of me as his."

"Hardly--if I marry him; and besides--when you know him--You see," she
began again, "what I have in mind depends upon your knowing him--rather
well."

"Then, Miss Guion," he laughed, "you can drop it. I've sized him up with
a look. I've seen others like him--at Gibraltar and Malta and Aden and
Hongkong and Cairo, and wherever their old flag floats. They're a fine
lot. He's all right for you--all right in his place. Only, the place
isn't--mine."

"Still," she persisted, "if I marry him you'd be sometimes in England;
and you'd come to visit us, wouldn't you?"

"Come and--what?" His astonishment made him speak slowly.

She took a step or two up the stairway, leaning on the banister in a way
to prevent his advancing. She was now looking down at him, instead of
looking up.

"Isn't it true--?" she said, with hesitation--"at least I've rather
guessed it--and I've gathered it from things Drusilla has said about
you--You see," she began once more, "if we're to be friends you mustn't
mind my speaking frankly and saying things that other people couldn't
say. You've intervened so much in my life that I feel you've given me a
right to--intervene--in yours."

"Oh, intervene as much as you like, Miss Guion," he said, honestly.

"Well, then, isn't it true that there are things you've wanted--wanted
very much--and never had? If so--and I marry Colonel Ashley--"

"Hold on! Let's see what you mean by--things. If it's visiting round in
high society--"

He tried to render as scorn his dismay at this touching on his weakness.

"I don't mean anything so crude. Visiting round in high society, as you
call it, would at best be only the outward and visible sign of an
inward--and, perhaps, spiritual--experience of the world. Isn't that
what you've wanted? You see, if I do marry Colonel Ashley, I
could--don't be offended!--I could open a door to you that you've never
been able to force for yourself."

"You mean get me into society."

"You needn't be so disdainful. I didn't mean that--exactly. But there
are people in the world different from those you meet in business--and
in their way more interesting--certainly more picturesque. They'd like
you if they knew you--and I had an idea that you--rather craved--After
all, it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's only making the world bigger
for oneself, and--"

Backing away from the stairway, he stood on a rug in the middle of the
hall, his head hung like a young bull about to charge.

"What made you think of it?"

"Isn't that obvious? After you've done so much for me--"

"I haven't done anything for you, Miss Guion. I've said so a good many
times. It wouldn't be right for me to take payment for what you don't
owe me. Besides, there's nothing I want."

"That is to say," she returned, coldly, "you prefer the rôle of
benefactor. You refuse to accept the little I might be able to do. I
admit that it isn't much--but it's _something_--something within my
power, and which I thought you might like. But since you don't--"

"It's no question of liking; it's one of admitting a principle. If you
offer me a penny it's in part payment for a pound, while I say, and say
again, that you don't owe me anything. If there's a debt at all it's
your father's--and it's not transferable."

"Whether it's transferable or not is a matter that rests between my
father and me--and, of course, Colonel Ashley, if I marry him."

He looked at her with sudden curiosity. "Why do you always say that
with--an 'if'?"

She reflected an instant. "Because," she said, slowly, "I can't say it
in any other way."

He straightened himself; he advanced again to the foot of the stairway.

"Is that because of any reason of--_his?_"

"It's because of a number of reasons, one of which is mine. It's
this--that I find it difficult to go away with one man--when I have to
turn my back upon the overwhelming debt I owe another. I do owe it--I
_do_. The more I try to ignore it, the more it comes in between me
and--"

He pressed forward, raising himself on the first step of the stairs,
till his face was on a level with hers. He grew red and stammered:

"But, Miss Guion, you're--you're--in love with him?--the man you'd be
going away with?"

She nodded. "Yes; but that wouldn't help me to feel justified with
regard to the--the duty--I was leaving behind."

He dropped again to the level of the hall. "I don't understand. Do you
mean to say that what I've done for Mr. Guion would keep you from
getting married?"

"I'm not prepared to say that. Colonel Ashley is so--so splendid in the
way he takes everything that--But I'll say this much," she began again,
"that you've made it _hard_ for me to be married."

"How so? I thought it would be all the other way."

"If you'll put yourself in my place--or in Colonel Ashley's
place--you'll see. Try to think what it means for two people like us to
go away--and be happy--and live in a great, fashionable world--and be
people of some importance--knowing that some one else--who was nothing
to us, as we were nothing to him--had to deprive himself of practically
everything he had in the world to enable us to do it."

"But if it was a satisfaction to him--"

"That wouldn't make any difference to us. The facts would be the same."

"Then, as far as I see, I've done more harm than good."

"You've helped papa."

"But I haven't helped you."

"As I understand it, you didn't want to."

"I didn't want to--to do the reverse."

"Perhaps it wouldn't be the reverse if you could condescend to let me do
something for you. It would be the fair exchange which is no robbery.
That's why I suggest that if I'm to have that--that life over there--you
should profit by its advantages."

He shook his head violently. "No, Miss Guion. Please don't think of it.
It's out of the question. I wish you'd let me say once for all that you
owe me nothing. I shall never accept anything from you--never!"

"Oh!" It was the protest of one who has been hurt.

"I'll take that back," he said, instantly. "There _is_ something you
can do for me and that I should like. Marry your Englishman, Miss Guion,
and do what you said just now--go away and be happy. If you want to give
me a reward, I'll take that."

She surveyed him a minute in astonishment. "You're perfectly
extraordinary," she said at last, in a tone of exasperation, "and"--she
threw at him a second later--"and impossible!"

Before he could reply she went grandly up the stairway, so that he was
obliged to follow her. In the hall above she turned on him again. Had he
not known that he had given her no cause for offence he would have said
that her eyes filled with tears.

"Things are very hard as it is," she said, reproachfully. "You needn't
go out of your way to make them gratuitously cruel."

"But, Miss Guion--" he began to protest.

"Please go in," she commanded, throwing open, as she spoke, the door of
her father's room.




XV


Meanwhile, down on the lawn, Drusilla and Ashley were talking things
over from their own points of view. There had been a second of
embarrassment when they were first left alone, which Drusilla got over
by pointing with her parasol to an indistinguishable spot in the stretch
of tree-tops, spires, and gables sloping from the gate, saying:

"That's our house--the one with the little white cupola."

He made no pretense to listen or to look. "She says she doesn't want to
marry me."

He made the statement dispassionately, as though laying down a subject
for academic discussion.

It was some little time before she could think what to say.

"Well, that doesn't surprise me," she risked at last.

"Doesn't surprise you?"

She shook her head. "On the contrary, I should be very much astonished
if she did--now. I should be astonished at any woman in her position
wanting to marry a man in yours."

"I don't care a hang for my position."

"Oh yes, you do. And even if you didn't, it wouldn't matter. It's
naturally a case in which you and she have to see from different angles.
With you it's a point of honor to stand by her; with her it's the same
thing not to let you."

"In honor it's the positive, not the negative, that takes precedence,
and the positive happens to be mine."

"I don't think you can argue that way, you know. What takes precedence
of everything else is--common sense."

"And do you mean to say that common sense requires that she shall give
me up?"

"I shouldn't go so far as to assert that. But I shouldn't mind saying
that if she did give you up there'd be a lot of common sense in her
doing it."

"On whose account? Mine?"

"Yes; and hers. Perhaps chiefly on hers. You can hardly realize the
number of things she has to take care of--and you'd be one more."

"I confess I don't seize your drift."

"It's not very abstruse, however. Just think. It isn't as if Cousin
Henry had fallen ill, or had died, or had gone to pieces in any of the
ordinary ways. Except for his own discomfort, he might just as well have
been tried and sentenced and sent to prison. He's been as good as there.
Every one knows it's only a special providence that he didn't go. But if
he's escaped that by the skin of his teeth, he hasn't escaped a lot of
other things. He hasn't escaped being without a penny in the world. He
hasn't escaped having his house sold over his head and being turned out
into the streets. He hasn't escaped reaching a perfectly impotent old
age, with not a soul on this earth to turn to but Olivia."

"What about me?"

"Would _you_ take him?"

"I shouldn't _take_ him exactly. If he was my father-in-law"--he made a
little grimace--"I suppose I could pension him off somewhere, or board
him out, like an old horse. One couldn't have him round."

"H'm! I dare say that would do--but I doubt it. If you'd ever been a
daughter you might feel that you couldn't dispose of a poor, old,
broken-down father quite so easily. After all, he's not a horse. You
might more or less forsake him when all was going well, and yet want to
stick to him through thick and thin if he came a cropper. Look at me! I
go off and leave my poor old dad for a year and more at a time--because
he's a saint; but if he wasn't--especially if he'd got into any such
scrape as Cousin Henry's--which isn't thinkable--but if he did--I'd
never leave him again. That's my temperament. It's every girl's
temperament. It's Olivia's. But all that is neither here nor there. If
she married you, her whole life would be given up to trying to make you
blend with a set of circumstances you couldn't possibly blend with. It
would be worse than singing one tune to an orchestra playing another.
She'd go mad with the attempt."

"Possibly; except for one factor which you've overlooked."

"Oh, love! Yes, yes. I thought you'd say that." Drusilla tossed her
hands impatiently. "Love will do a lot, but it won't do everything. You
can't count on it to work miracles in a sophisticated company like the
Sussex Rangers. They've passed the age of faith for that sort of thing."

"I don't see," he said, speaking very slowly, "that the Rangers need be
altogether taken into consideration."

She looked at him fixedly. "Do you mean that you'd--send in your
papers?"

"Only in the sense that if my wife wasn't happy in the Service we could
get out of it."

"Then you're really so much in love that you'd be willing to throw up
everything on account of it?" There was some incredulity in her tone, to
which, however, he offered no objection.

"Willing or unwilling isn't to the point. Surely you see that as far as
public opinion goes I'm dished either way. The more I think of it the
plainer it becomes. If I marry Olivia I let myself in for connection
with a low-down scandal; if I don't, then they'll say I left her in the
lurch. As for the effect on any possible promotion there might be in
store for me, it would be six of one and half a dozen of the other. If I
married her, and there was something good to be had, and old
Bannockburn, let us say, was at the Horse Guards, then Lady Ban wouldn't
have Olivia; and if I didn't marry her, and there was the same situation
with old Englemere in command, then he wouldn't have me. There it is in
a nutshell--simply nothing to choose."

They proceeded to stroll aimlessly up and down the lawn.

"I can quite see how it looks from your point of view--" she began.

"No, you can't," he interrupted, sharply, "because you leave out the
fact that I am--I don't mind saying it--that is, to you--you've been
such a good pal to me!--I shall never forget it!--but I _am_--head over
heels--desperately--in love."

Having already heard this confession in what now seemed the far-off days
in Southsea, she could hear it again with no more than a sense of
oppression about the heart.

"Yes," she smiled, bravely. "I know you are. And between two ills you
choose the one that has some compensation attached to it."

"Between two ills," he corrected, "I'm choosing the only course open to
a man of honor. Isn't that it?"

There was a wistful inflection on the query. It put forth at one and the
same time a request for corroboration and a challenge to a contrary
opinion. If there could be no contrary opinion, he would have been glad
of some sign of approval or applause. He wanted to be modest; and yet it
was a stimulus to doing precisely the right thing to get a little praise
for it, especially from a woman like Drusilla.

In this for once she disappointed him. "Of course you are," she
assented, even too promptly.

"And yet you're advising me," he said, returning to the charge, "to make
a bolt for it--and leave Olivia to shift for herself."

"If I remember rightly, the question you raised was not about you, but
about her. It wasn't as to whether you should marry her, but as to
whether she should marry you. I'm not disputing your point of view; I'm
only defending Olivia's. I can see three good reasons why you should
keep your word to her--"

"Indeed? And what are they?"

She told them off on her fingers. "First, as you can't do anything else.
Second--"

"Your first reason," he interrupted, hastily, as though he feared she
suspected him of not being convinced of it, "covers the whole ground. We
don't need the rest."

"Still," she insisted, "we might as well have them. Second, it's the
more prudent of two rather disadvantageous courses. Third--to quote your
own words--you're head over heels in love with her. It's easy to see
that now, and now another of these reasons is uppermost in your mind;
but it's also easy to see that none of them makes a conclusive appeal to
Olivia Guion. That's the point."

"The point is that I'm in love with her, and--if it's not claiming too
much--she with me. We've nothing else to consider."

"You haven't. She has. She has all the things I've just hinted at--and
ever so many more; besides which," she added, taking a detached, casual
tone, "I suppose she has to make up her mind one way or another as to
what she's going to do about Peter Davenant."

The crow's-foot wrinkles about his eyes deepened to a frown of inquiry.
"About Peter--who?"

Drusilla still affected a casual tone. "Oh? Hasn't she told you about
_him?_"

"Not a word. Who is he?"

She nodded in the direction of the house. "He's up-stairs with Cousin
Henry."

"The big fellow who was here just now? That--lumpkin?"

"Yes," she said, dryly, "that--lumpkin. It was he who gave Cousin Henry
the money to meet his liabilities."

"So he's the Fairy Prince? He certainly doesn't look it."

"No; he doesn't look it; but he's as much of a problem to Olivia as if
he did."

"Why? What has he to do with her?"

"Nothing, except that I suppose she must feel very grateful."

They reached the edge of the lawn where a hedge of dahlias separated
them from the neighboring garden.

"When you say that," he asked, "do you mean anything in particular?"

"I suppose I mean everything in particular. The situation is one in
which all the details count."

"And the bearing of this special detail--"

"Oh, don't try to make me explain that. In the first place, I don't
know; and in the second, I shouldn't tell you if I did. I'm merely
giving you the facts. I think you're entitled to know _them_."

"So I should have said. Are there many more? I've had a lot since I
landed. I thought I must have heard pretty well all there was--"

"Probably you had, except just that. I imagine Olivia found it
difficult to speak of, and so I'm doing it for her."

"Why should she find it difficult to speak of? It's a mere matter of
business, I suppose."

"If it's business to give Cousin Henry what would be nearly a hundred
thousand pounds in English money, with no prospect that any one can see
of his ever getting it back--that is, not unless old Madame de
Melcourt--"

"Oh, I say! Then he's one of your beastly millionaires, by Jove!--grind
the noses off the poor, and that sort of thing, to play
Haroun-al-Raschid with the cash."

"Not in the least. He never ground the nose off any one; and as for
being a millionaire, father says that what he's done for Cousin Henry
will pretty well clean him out."

"All the same, he's probably done it with a jolly sharp eye to the main
chance."

"Oh, I dare say his motives weren't altogether altruistic. Only it's a
little difficult to see where the main chance comes in."

"Then what the deuce is he up to?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that. I repeat that I'm only giving you the
facts. You must interpret them for yourself."

He looked thoughtful. Drusilla plucked a scarlet dahlia and fastened it
in her dress, after which they strolled back slowly to the middle of the
lawn. Here Ashley said:

"Has all this got anything to do with Olivia? I wish you wouldn't make
mysteries."

"I'm not making mysteries. I'm telling you what's happened just as it
occurred. He advanced the money to Cousin Henry, and that's all I know
about it. If I draw any inferences--"

"Well?"

"I'm just as likely to be wrong as right."

"Then you _have_ drawn inferences?"

"Who wouldn't? I should think you'd be drawing them yourself."

They wandered on a few yards, when he stopped again. "Look here," he
said, with a sort of appealing roughness, "you're quite straight with
me, aren't you?"

The rich, surging color came swiftly into her face, as wine seen through
something dark and transparent. Her black eyes shone like jet. She would
have looked tragic had it not been for her fixed, steady smile.

"Have I ever been anything else with you?"

"No. You've been straight as a die. I'll say that for you. You've been a
good pal--a devilish good pal! But over here--in America--everything
seems to go by enigmas--and puzzles--and surprises--"

"I'll explain what I can to you," she said, with a heightened color,
"but it won't be so very easy. There are lots of people who, feeling as
I do--toward Olivia--and--and toward you--would want to beat about the
bush. But when all these things began to happen--and you were already on
the way--I turned everything over in my mind and decided to speak
exactly as I think."

"Good!"

"But it isn't so very easy," she repeated, pretending to rearrange the
dahlia in her laces, so as to find a pretext for not looking him in the
eyes. "It isn't so very easy; and if--later on--in after years
perhaps--when everything is long over--it ever strikes you that I didn't
play fair--it'll be because I played _so_ fair that I laid myself open
to that imputation. One can, you know. I only ask you to remember it.
That's all."

Ashley was bewildered. He could follow little more than half of what she
said. "More mysteries," he was sighing to himself as she spoke. "And
such a color! That's her strong point. Pity it only comes by fits and
flashes. But, good Lord, what a country! Always something queer and
new."

"Good-by," she said, offering her hand before he had time to emerge from
his meditations. "We shall see you to-morrow evening. And, by the way,
we dine at half-past seven. We're country people here, and primitive.
No; don't come to the gate. Olivia must be wondering where you are."

He looked after her as she tripped over the lawn toward the roadway,
still holding her long-handled, beribboned, eighteenth-century sunshade
with the daintiness of a Watteau shepherdess holding a crook.

"She's a good 'un," he said to himself. "Straight as a die, she is--and
true as steel."

None the less he was glad when she left him.




XVI


Ashley wanted to be alone. He needed solitude in order to face the
stupendous bit of information Mrs. Fane had given him. Everything else
he had heard during the past twenty-four hours he had felt himself more
or less competent to meet. True, his meeting it would be at a sacrifice
and the probable loss of some of the best things he had hoped and worked
for; but he should have the satisfaction that comes to every man of
honor when he has done a brave thing well. There would be something,
too, in giving the lie to people who accused him of having no thought
but for his own advancement. He had been sensitive to that charge,
because of the strain of truth in it, and yet had seen no means of
counteracting it. Very well; he should counteract it now.

Since there was no way out of the situation he had found in
America--that is, no way consistent with self-respect--it was
characteristic of him, both as diplomatist and master of tactics, to
review what was still in his favor. He called himself to witness that he
had wasted no time in repining. He had risen to the circumstances as
fast as nature would permit, and adapted himself right on the spur of
the moment to an entirely new outlook on the future. Moreover, he had
been able to detach Olivia herself from the degrading facts surrounding
her, seeing her, as he had seen her from the first, holy and stainless,
untouched by conditions through which few women could pass without some
personal deterioration. In his admiration and loyalty he had not wavered
for a second. On the contrary, he was sure that he should love her the
more intensely, in spite of, and perhaps because of, her misfortunes.

He felt free, therefore, to resent this new revelation so fantastically
out of proportion to the harmony of life. It was the most staggering
thing he had ever heard of. An act such as that with which Drusilla
credited Davenant brought into daily existence a feature too prodigious
to find room there. Or, rather, having found the room through sheer
force of its own bulk, it dwarfed everything else into insignificance.
It hid all objects and blocked all ways. You could get neither round it
nor over it nor through it. You could not even turn back and ignore it.
You could only stand and stare at it helplessly, giving it the full
tribute of awe.

Ashley gave it. He gave it while lighting mechanically a cigar which he
did not smoke and standing motionless in the middle of the lawn,
heedless of the glances--furtive, discreet, sympathetic, admiring--cast
at him from the windows and balconies of the surrounding houses. His
quick eye, trained to notice everything within its ken, saw them plainly
enough. The houses were not so distant nor the foliage so dense but that
kindly, neighborly interest could follow the whole drama taking place
at Tory Hill. Ashley could guess with tolerable accuracy that the ladies
whom he saw ostensibly reading or sewing on verandas had been invited to
the wedding, and were consequently now in the position of spectators at
a play. The mere detail of this American way of living, with unwalled
properties merging into one another, and doors and windows flung wide to
every passing glance, gave him an odd sense of conducting his affairs in
the market-place or on the stage. If he did not object to it, it was
because of the incitement to keep up to the level of his best which he
always drew from the knowledge that other people's eyes were upon him.

He felt this stimulus when Olivia came out to the Corinthian portico,
seating herself in a wicker chair, with an obvious invitation to him to
join her. "Drusilla Fane has been telling me about your--your friend."

She knew he meant the last two words to be provocative. She knew it by
slight signs of nervousness in his way of standing before her, one foot
on the grass and the other on the first step of the portico. He betrayed
himself, too, in an unsuccessful attempt to make his intonation casual,
as well as by puffing at his cigar without noticing that it had gone
out. An instant's reflection decided her to accept his challenge. As the
subject had to be met, the sooner it came up the better.

She looked at him mildly. "What did she say about him?"

"Only that he was the man who put up the money."

"Yes; he was."

"Why didn't you tell me that this morning?"

"I suppose because there was so much else to say. We should have come
round to it in time. I did tell you everything but his name."

"And the circumstances."

"How do you mean--the circumstances?"

"I got the impression from you this morning that it was some millionaire
Johnny who'd come to your father's aid by advancing the sum in the
ordinary way of business. I didn't understand that it was a
comparatively poor chap who was cleaning himself out to come to yours."

In wording his phrase he purposely went beyond the warrant, in order to
rouse her to denial, or perhaps to indignation. But she said only:

"Did Drusilla say it was to come to my aid?"

"She didn't say it--exactly. I gathered that it was what she thought."

She astonished him by saying, simply: "I think so, too."

"Extraordinary! Do you mean to say he dropped out of a clear sky?"

"I must answer that by both a yes and a no. He did drop out of a clear
sky just lately; but I'd known him before."

"Ah!" His tone was that of a cross-examiner dragging the truth from an
unwilling witness. He put his questions rapidly and sharply, as though
at a Court-martial. "So you'd known him before! Did you know him
_well?_"

"_I_ didn't think it was well; but apparently he did, because he asked
me to marry him."

Ashley bounded. "Who? That--that cowboy!"

"Yes; if he _is_ a cowboy."

"And you took money from him?"

Her elbows rested on the arm of her chair; the tip of her chin on the
back of her bent fingers. Without taking her eyes from his she inclined
her head slowly in assent.

"That is," he hastened to say, in some compunction, "your father took
it. We must keep the distinction--"

"No; I took it. Papa was all ready to decline it. He had made up his
mind--"

"Do you mean that the decision to accept it rested with you?"

"Practically."

"You didn't--" He hesitated, stammered, and grew red. "You didn't--" he
began again. "You'll have to excuse the question.... I simply _must_
know, by Jove!... You didn't _ask_ him for it?"

She rose with dignity. "If you'll come in I'll tell you about it. We
can't talk out here."

He came up the portico steps to the level on which she was standing.
"Tell me that first," he begged.

"You _didn't_ ask him for it? Did you?"

In the French window, as she was about to enter the room, she half
turned round. "I don't think it would bear that construction; but it
might. I'd rather you judged for yourself. I declined it at first--and
then I said I'd take it. I don't know whether you'd call that asking.
But please come in."

He followed her into the oval room, where they were screened from
neighborly observation, while, with the French window open, they had the
advantage of the air and the rich, westering sunshine. Birds hopped
about in the trees, and now and then a gray squirrel darted across the
grass.

"I should think," he said, nervously, before she had time to begin her
explanation, "that a fellow who had done that for you would occupy your
mind to the exclusion of everybody else."

Guessing that he hoped for a disclaimer on her part, she was sorry to be
unable to make it.

"Not to their exclusion--but perhaps--a little to their subordination."

He pretended to laugh. "What a pretty distinction!"

"You see, I haven't been able to help it. He's loomed up so tremendously
above everything--"

"And every one."

"Yes," she admitted, with apologetic frankness, "and every one--that is,
in the past few days--that it's as if I couldn't see anything but him."

"Oh, I'm not jealous," he exclaimed, pacing up and down the length of
the room.

"Of course not," she agreed, seating herself in one of the
straight-backed chairs. Her clasped hands rested on the small round
table in the center of the room, while she looked out across the lawn to
the dahlias and zinnias on its farther edge.

Ashley, who had flung his panama on a sofa, continued to pace up and
down the room, his head bent and his fingers clasped tightly under his
jacket behind his back. He moved jerkily, like a man preserving outward
self-control in spite of extreme nervous tension.

He listened almost without interruption while she gave him a precise
account of Davenant's intervention in her father's troubles. She spared
no detail of her own opposition and eventual capitulation. She spoke
simply and easily, as though repeating something learned by heart, just
as she had narrated the story of Guion's defaulting in the morning.
Apart from the fact that she toyed with a paper-knife lying on the
table, she sat rigidly still, her eyes never wandering from the line of
autumn flowers on the far side of the lawn.

"So you see," she concluded, in her quiet voice, "I came to understand
that it was a choice between taking it from him and taking it from the
poor women papa had ruined; and I thought that as he was young--and
strong--and a man--he'd be better able to bear it. That was the reason."

He came to a standstill on the other side of the table, where he could
see her in profile.

"You're extraordinary, by Jove!" he muttered. "You're not a bit like
what you look. You look so fragile and tender; and yet you could have
let that old man--"

"I could only have done it if it was right. Nothing that's right is very
hard, you know."

"And what about the suffering?"

She half smiled, faintly shrugging her shoulders. "Don't you think we
make more of suffering than there's any need for? Suffering is nothing
much--except, I suppose, the suffering that comes from want. That's
tragic. But physical pain--and the things we call trials--are nothing so
terrible if you know the right way to bear them."

The abstract question didn't interest him. He resumed his restless
pacing.

"So," he began again, in his tone of conducting a court-martial--"so you
refused the money in the first place, because you thought the fellow was
trying to get you into his power. Have you had any reason to change your
opinion since?"

"None, except that he makes no effort to do it."

He stopped again beside the table. "And do you suppose he would? When
you've prepared your ambush cleverly enough you don't have to go out and
drag your victim into it. You've only to lie still and he'll walk in of
his own accord."

"Of course I see that."

"Well, what then?"

She threw him a glance over her shoulder. To do so it was necessary for
her to turn her head both sidewise and upward, so that he got the
exquisite lines of the neck and profile, the mysterious gray-green tint
of the eyes, and the coppery gleam of her hair. The appeal to his senses
and to something beyond his senses made him gasp. It made him tremble.
"My God, what a wife for _me_!" he was saying to himself. "She's got the
pluck of a Jeanne d'Arc and the nerve of a Christian martyr."

"Well, then," she said, in answer to his words--"then I don't have to
walk into the ambush--unless I want to."

"Does that mean that there are conceivable conditions in which you might
want to?"

She turned completely round in her chair. Both hands, with fingers
interlaced, rested on the table as she looked up at him.

"I shall have to let you find your own reply to that."

"But you know he's in love with you."

"I know he was in love with me once. I've no absolute reason to think
that he is so still."

"But supposing he was? Would it make any difference to you?"

"Would it make any difference to _you?_"

"It would make the difference--"

He stopped in confusion. While he was not clear as to what he was going
to say, he was startled by the possibilities before him. The one thing
plain was that her question, simple as it seemed, gave an entirely new
turn to the conversation. It called on him to take the lead, and put
him, neatly and skilfully, in the one place of all others which--had he
descried it in advance--he would have been eager to avoid. Would it make
any difference to him? What difference _could_ it make? What difference
_must_ it make?

It was one of those moments which occur from time to time when a man of
honor must speak first and reflect afterward--just as at the heights of
Dargal he had had to risk his life for Private Vickerson's, without
debating as to which of them, in the general economy of lives, could the
more easily be spared.

"It would make the difference--"

He stopped again. It was a great deal to say. Once he had said it there
could be no reconsideration. Reconsideration would be worse than not
saying it at all, on the principle that not to stand by one's guns might
be a greater cowardice than not to mount them. Fear, destruction, and
the pit might come upon him; the service, the country, Heneage, home,
honors, ambitions, promotions, high posts of command, all might be swept
into the abyss, and yet one imperative duty would survive the wreck, the
duty to be Rupert Ashley at his finest. The eyes of England were on him.
There was always that conviction, that incentive. Let his heroism be
never so secret, sooner or later those eyes would find him out.

He was silent so long that she asked, not impatiently: "It would make
what difference, Rupert?"

It was clear that she had no idea as to what was passing in his mind.
There had been an instant--just an instant--no more--when he had almost
doubted her, when her strategy in putting him where he was had seemed
too deft to be the result of chance. But, with her pure face turned
upward and her honest eyes on his, that suspicion couldn't last.

"It would make the difference--"

If he paused again, it was only because his throat swelled with a
choking sensation that made it difficult to speak; he felt, too, that
his face was congested. Nevertheless the space, which was not longer
than a few seconds by the clock, gave him time to remember that as his
mother's and his sisters' incomes were inalienable he was by so much
the more free. He was by so much the more free to do the mad, romantic,
quixotic thing, which might seem to be a contradiction of his past, but
was not so much a contradiction of _himself_ as people who knew him
imperfectly might suppose. He was taken to be ambitious, calculating,
shrewd; when all the while he knew himself to be--as most Englishmen are
at heart--quixotic, romantic, and even a little mad, when madness can be
sublime.

He was able at last to get his sentence out.

"It would make the difference that ... before we are married ... or
after ... probably after ... I should have to square him."

"Square him?" She echoed the words as though she had no idea what they
meant.

"I'm worth ... I _must_ be worth ... a hundred thousand pounds ...
perhaps more."

"Oh, you mean, square him in that way."

"I must be a man of honor before everything, by Jove!"

"You couldn't be anything else. You don't need to go to extremes like
that to prove it."

Her lack of emotion, of glad enthusiasm, chilled him. She even ceased to
look at him, turning her profile toward him and gazing again
abstractedly across the lawn. A sudden fear took hold of him, the fear
that his hesitations, his evident difficulty in getting the thing out,
had enabled her to follow the processes by which he whipped himself up
to an act that should have been spontaneous. He had a suspicion, too,
that in this respect he had fallen short of the American--the cowboy,
as he had called him. "I must do better than him," he said, in his
English idiom. The thought that he might not have done as well was
rather sickening. If he had so failed it was through inadvertence, but
the effect on Olivia would be as great as if it was from fear. To
counteract it he felt the need of being more emphatic. His emphasis took
the form of simple common sense.

"It isn't going to extremes to take up one's own responsibilities. I
can't let a fellow like that do things for your father any more than for
mine, by Jove! It's not only doing things for my father, but for--my
wife."

Drawing up a small chair, he sat down on the other side of the table. He
sat down with the air of a man who means to stay and take possession.

"Oh, but I'm not your wife, Rupert."

"You're my wife already," he declared, "to all intents and purposes.
We've published our intention to become man and wife to the world.
Neither of us can go back on that. The mere fact that certain words
haven't been mumbled over us is secondary. For everything that
constitutes duty I'm your husband now."

"Oh no, you're not. You're the noblest man in the world, Rupert. I never
dreamed that there could be any one like you. But I couldn't let you--I
couldn't--"

He crushed her hands in both of his own, leaning toward her across the
table. "Oh, my darling, if you only knew how easy it is--"

"No, it isn't easy. It can't be easy. I couldn't let you do it for me--"

"But what about _him?_ You let--_him!_"

"Oh, but that's different."

"How is it different?"

"I don't know, Rupert; but it is. Or rather," she went on, rapidly, "I
do know, but I can't explain. If you were an American you'd understand
it."

"Oh, American--be blowed!" The accent was all tenderness, the protest
all beseeching.

"I can't explain it," she hurried on, "because you don't understand us.
It's one of the ways in which an Englishman never _can_ understand us.
But the truth is that money doesn't mean as much to us as it does to
you. I know you think the contrary, but that's where you make your
primary mistake. It's light come and light go with most of us, for the
simple reason that money is outside our real life; whereas with you
English it's the warp and woof of it."

"Oh, bosh, darling!"

"No, it isn't bosh. In your civilization it's as the blood; in ours it's
only as the clothing. That's something like the difference. In accepting
it from Peter Davenant--which is hard enough!--I take only what he can
do without; whereas--"

"I can do without it, too."

"Whereas," she persisted, "if I were to let you do this I should be
robbing you of the essence of what you are."

He drew back slightly. "You mean that your Yankee is a strong man, while
I'm--"

"I don't mean anything invidious or unkind. But isn't it self-evident,
or nearly, that we're individuals, while you're parts of an intricate
social system? The minute you fall out of your place in the system you
come to grief; but vicissitudes don't affect us much more than a change
of coats."

"I don't care a button for my place in the system."

"But I do. I care for it _for_ you. I should have married you and shared
it if I could. But I'd rather not marry you than that you should lose
it."

"That is," he said, coldly, "you'd rather use _his_ money than--"

She withdrew her hands, her brows contracting and her eyes clouding in
her effort to make him understand the position from her point of view.
"You see, it's this way. For one thing, we've taken the money already.
That's past. We may have taken it temporarily, or for good and all, as
things turn out; but in any case it's done. And yet even if it weren't
done it would be easier for us to draw on him rather than on you,
because he's one of ourselves."

"One of yourselves? I thought that's just what he wasn't. I thought he
was a jolly outsider."

"You mean socially. But that again hasn't much significance in a country
where socially we're all of one class. Where there's only one class
there can't be any outsiders."

"Oh, that's all very fine. But look at you with your extremes of rich
and poor!"

"That's the most superficial difference among us. It's the easiest
possible thing to transcend. I'm transcending it now in feeling that
I've a right--yes, a kind of right--to take Peter Davenant's money,
because as Americans we've a claim on each other."

He threw himself against the straight back of the chair, his arms flung
out with a gesture that brought his hands nearly to the floor. "You're
the last people in the world to feel anything of the kind. Every one
knows that you're a set of ruthless, predatory--"

"I know that's the way it seems; and I'm not defending anything that may
be wrong. And yet, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, we
_have_ a sense of brotherhood--I don't know any other name for it--among
ourselves which isn't to be found anywhere else in the world. You
English haven't got it. That's why the thing I'm saying seems mere
sentiment to you, and even mawkish. You're so afraid of sentiment. But
it's true. It may be only a rudimentary sense of brotherhood; and it's
certainly not universal, as it ought to be, because we feel it only
among ourselves. We don't really include the foreigner--not at least
till he becomes one of us. I'm an instance of that limitation myself,
because I can't feel it toward you, and I do--"

"You do feel it toward the big chap," he said, scornfully.

She made a renewed effort to explain herself. "You see, it's something
like this. If my aunt de Melcourt, who's very well off, were to come
forward and help us, I'd let her do it without scruple. Not that there's
any particular reason why she should! But if she did--well, you can see
for yourself that it wouldn't be as if she were a stranger."

"Of course! She's one of your own people--and all that."

"Well, he's one of our own people--Mr. Davenant. Not to the degree that
she is--but the same sort of thing--even if more distant. It's very
distant, I admit--"

His lip curled. "So distant as to be out of sight."

"No; not for him--or for me."

He sprang to his feet. "Look here, Olivia," he cried, nervously, holding
his chair by the back, "what does it all mean? What are you leading up
to?"

"I'm telling you as plainly as I can."

"What you aren't telling me as plainly as you can is which of us you're
in love with."

She colored. It was one of those blushes that spread up the temples and
over the brows and along the line of the hair with the splendor of a
stormy dawn.

"I didn't know the question had been raised," she said, "but since
apparently it has--"

It might have been contrition for a foolish speech, or fear of what she
was going to say, that prompted him to interrupt her hurriedly:

"I beg your pardon. It was idiotic of me to say that. I didn't mean it.
As a matter of fact, I'm jumpy. I'm not master of myself. So much has
been happening--"

He came round the table, and, snatching one of her hands, he kissed it
again and again. He even sank on one knee beside her, holding her close
to him. With the hand that remained free she stroked his crisp, wavy,
iron-gray hair as a sign of pardon.

"You're quite wrong about me," he persisted.

"Even if you're right about other Englishmen--which I don't
admit--you're wrong about me, by Jove! If I had to give up everything I
had in the world I should have all the compensation a man could desire
if I got you."

She leaned over him, pressing his head against her breast, as she
whispered:

"You couldn't get me that way. You must understand--I must make it as
plain to you as I can--that I couldn't go to you except as an equal. I
couldn't go to any man--"

He sprang to his feet. "But you _came_ to me as an equal," he cried, in
tones of exasperation. "That's all over and done with. It's too late to
reconsider the step we've taken--too late for me--much too late!--and
equally too late for you."

"I can't admit that, Rupert. I've still the right to draw back."

"The legal right--yes; whether or not you've the moral right would
depend on your sense of honor."

"Of honor?"

"Certainly. There's an honor for you as well as for me. When I'm so true
to you it wouldn't be the square thing to play me false."

She rose without haste. "Do you call that a fair way of putting it--to
say that I play you false because I refuse to involve you in our family
disasters? I don't think any one could blame me for that."

"What they could blame you for is this--for backing out of what is
practically a marriage, and for deserting me in a way that will make it
seem as if I had deserted you. Quite apart from the fact that life won't
be worth anything to me without you, it will mean ruin as a man of honor
if I go home alone. Every one will say--_every one_--that I funked the
thing because your father--"

She hastened to speak. "That's a very urgent reason. I admit its
force--"

She paused because there was a sound of voices overhead. Footsteps came
along the upper hall and began to descend the stairs. Presently Davenant
could be heard saying:

"Then I shall tell Harrington that they may as well foreclose at one
time as another."

"Just as well." Guion's reply came from the direction of his bedroom
door. "I see nothing to be gained by waiting. The sooner it's over the
sooner to sleep, what?"

"They're talking about the mortgage on the property," she explained, as
Davenant continued to descend. "This house is to be sold--and everything
in it--"

"Which is one more reason why we should be married without delay. I
say," he added, in another tone, "let's have him in."

"Oh no! What for?"

Before she could object further, Ashley had slipped out into the hall.

"I say! Come along in."

His attitude as he stood with hands thrust into his jacket pockets and
shoulders squared bespoke conscious superiority to the man whom he was
addressing. Though Davenant was not in her line of vision she could
divine his astonishment at this easy, English unceremoniousness, as well
as his resentment to the tone of command. She heard him muttering an
excuse which Ashley interrupted with his offhand "Oh, come in. Miss
Guion would like to see you."

She felt it her duty to go forward and second this invitation. Davenant,
who was standing at the foot of the staircase, murmured something about
town and business.

"It's too late for town and business at this hour," Ashley objected.
"Come in."

He withdrew toward the room where Olivia was standing between the
portières of the doorway. Davenant yielded, partly because of his
ignorance of the small arts of graceful refusal, but more because of his
curiosity concerning the man Olivia Guion was to marry. He had some
interest, too, in observing one who was chosen where he himself had been
rejected. It would afford an answer to the question, "What lack I yet?"
with which he was tormented at all times. That it could not be a
flattering answer was plain to him from the careless, indefinable graces
of Ashley's style. It was a style that Davenant would have scorned to
imitate, but which nevertheless he envied. In contrast with its
unstudied ease he could feel his own social methods to be labored and
apologetic. Where he was watchful to do the right thing, what Ashley
said or did became the right thing because he said or did it. With the
echo of soft English vowels and clear, crisp consonants in his ears, his
own pronunciations, too, were rough with the harshness transmitted from
an ancestry to whom the melody of speech had been of no more practical
concern than the music of the spheres.

Something of all this Olivia guessed. She guessed it with a feeling of
being on his side--on the American side--which a month ago would have
astonished her. She guessed, too, on Davenant's part, that feeling of
irritation which the calm assumptions of the Old World are likely to
create when in contact with the aggressive unpretentiousness of the New,
and if need were she was ready to stand by him. All she could say,
however, for the moment was:

"Won't you sit down? Perhaps I ought to ring for tea."

She made the latter remark from habit. It was what she was accustomed to
think of when on an autumn day the sun went behind the distant rim of
Brookline hills and dusk began to gather in the oval room, as it was
gathering now. If she did not ring, it was because of her sense of the
irony of offering hospitality in a house where not even a cup of tea was
paid for.

She seated herself beside the round table in the chair she had occupied
a half-hour earlier, facing inward to the room instead of outward to the
portico. Ashley backed to the curving wall of the room, while Davenant
scarcely advanced beyond the doorway. In his slow, careful approach the
latter reminded her somewhat of a big St. Bernard dog responding to the
summons of a leopard.

"Been up to see--?" Ashley nodded in the direction of what he took to be
Guion's room.

Davenant, too, nodded, but said nothing.

"How did you find papa to-day?"

"Pretty fair, Miss Guion; only, perhaps, a little more down on his luck
than usual."

"The excitement kept him up at first. Now that that's over--"

Ashley interrupted her, addressing himself to Davenant. "I understand
that it's to you we owe Mr. Guion's relief from the most pressing part
of his cares."

Davenant's face clouded. It was the thing he was afraid of--Ashley's
intrusion into the little domain of helpfulness which for a few days he
had made his own. He answered warily:

"My business with Mr. Guion, Colonel, has been private. I hope you won't
mind if we leave it so."

Ashley's manner took on the diplomatic persuasiveness he used toward
restive barbaric potentates.

"Not a bit, my dear fellow. Of course it's private--only not as regards
Miss Guion and me. You simply _must_ allow us to say how grateful we are
for your help, even though it need be no more than temporary."

The word produced its effect. Davenant looked from Ashley to Olivia
while he echoed it. "Temporary?"

Ashley nodded again. "You have no objection, I presume, to that?"

"If Mr. Guion is ever in a position to pay me back," Davenant said,
slowly, in some bewilderment, "of course I'll take it."

"Quite so; and I think I may say that with a little time--let us say a
year--we shall be able to meet--"

"It's a good bit of money," Davenant warned him.

"I know that; but if you'll give us a little leeway--as I know you
will--"

"He means," Olivia spoke up, "that he'll sell his property--and whatever
else he has--and pay you."

"I don't want that," Davenant said, hastily.

"But I do. It's a point of honor with me not to let another man
shoulder--"

"And it's a point of honor with me, Rupert--"

"To stand by me," he broke in, quickly.

"I can't see it that way. What you propose is entirely against my
judgment. It's fantastic; it's unreal. I want you to understand that if
you attempted to carry it out I shouldn't marry you. Whatever the
consequences either to you or to me--_I shouldn't marry you_."

"And if I didn't attempt it? Would you marry me then?"

She looked up, then down, then at Davenant, then away from him. Finally
she fixed her gaze on Ashley.

"Yes," she said at last. "If you'll promise to let this wild project
drop, I'll marry you whenever you like. I'll waive all the other
difficulties--"

Davenant came forward, his hand outstretched. "I think I must say
good-by now, Miss Guion--"

"No; wait," Ashley commanded. "This matter concerns you, by Jove!"

Olivia sprang to her feet. "No; it doesn't, Rupert," she said, hastily.

"No; it doesn't," Davenant repeated after her. "It's not my affair. I
decline to be brought into it. I think I must say good-by now, Miss
Guion--"

"Listen, will you!" Ashley said, impatiently. "I'm not going to say
anything either of you need be afraid of. I'm only asking you to do me
the justice of trying to see things from my point of view. You may think
it forced or artificial or anything you please; but unfortunately, as an
officer and a gentleman, I've got to take it. The position you'd put me
in would be this--of playing a game--and a jolly important game at
that--in which the loser loses to me on purpose."

Ashley found much satisfaction in this way of putting it. Without
exposing him to the necessity of giving details, it made clear his
perception of what was going on. Moreover, it secured him _le beau
rôle_, which for a few minutes he feared he might have compromised. In
the look he caught, as it flashed between Olivia and Davenant, he saw
the signs of that appreciation he found it so hard to do without--the
appreciation of Rupert Ashley as the chivalrous Christian gentleman, at
once punctilious and daring, who would count all things as loss in order
to achieve the highest type of manhood. If in the back of his mind he
had the conviction, hardly venturing to make itself a thought, "In the
long run it pays," it was but little to his discredit, since he could
scarcely have descended from a line of shrewd, far-sighted Anglo-Saxon
forefathers without making some such computation.

"If we're going to play a game," he continued, addressing Davenant,
before the latter had time to speak, "for Heaven's sake let us play it
straight--like men. Let the winner win and the loser lose--"

"I've no objection to that, Colonel, when I _do_ play--but at present--"

"Look here," Ashley said, with a new inspiration; "I put it to you--I
put it to you as a man--simply as a _man_--without any highfalutin
principles whatever. Suppose I'd done what you've done--and given my
bottom dollar--"

"But I haven't."

"Well, no matter! Suppose I had done what you've done--and you were in
my place--would you, as a man--simply as a _man_, mind you--be willing
to go off with the lady whom I had freed from great anxiety--to say the
least--and be happy forever after--and so forth--with nothing but a
Thank-you-sir? Come now! Would you?"

It was evident that Davenant was shy of accepting this challenge. He
colored and looked uneasy--all the more so because Olivia lifted her
eyes to him appealingly, as though begging him to come to her support.
It was perhaps in the belief that he would do so that she said,
earnestly, leaning forward a little:

"Tell him, Mr. Davenant, tell him."

"I don't see what it's got to do with me--" Davenant began to protest.

"It's got everything to do with you," Ashley broke in. "Since you've
created the situation you can't shirk its responsibilities."

"Tell him, Mr. Davenant, tell him," Olivia repeated. "Would you, or
would you not?"

He looked helplessly from one to the other. "Well, then--I wouldn't," he
said, simply.

"There you are!" Ashley cried, triumphantly, moving away from the wall
and turning toward Olivia.

She was plainly disappointed. Davenant could so easily have said, "I
would." Nevertheless, she answered quietly, picking up the paper-knife
that lay on the table and turning it this way and that as though
studying the tints of the mother-of-pearl in the dying light:

"It doesn't matter to me, Rupert, what other people would do or would
not do. If you persist in this attempt--this mad attempt--I shall not
marry you."

He strode to the table, looking down at her averted face and bent head.

"Then we're at a deadlock."

She gave him a quick glance. "No; it isn't a deadlock, because--because
there's still a way out."

He leaned above her, supporting himself with his hand on the table. "And
it's a way I shall never take so long as you can't say--what you
admitted a little while ago that you couldn't say--"

"I can't say it," she murmured, her face still further averted; "but all
the same it's cruel of you to make it a condition."

He bent lower till his lips almost touched her hair. "It's cruel of
you," he whispered, "to put me in the position where I must."

The room and the hall behind it were now so dim that Davenant had no
difficulty in slipping between the portières and getting away.




XVII


"He's going to squeeze me out."

This was Davenant's reflection as he walked back, along the Embankment,
to Rodney Temple's house. He made it bitterly, in the light of clarified
views, as to the ethics of giving and taking benefits. Up to within the
last few days the subject had seemed to him a relatively simple one. If
you had money, and wished to give it away, you gave it. If you needed
it, and were so lucky as to have it offered you, you took it. That was
all. That such natural proceedings should create complicated relations
and searchings of heart never entered his mind.

He could see that they might, however, now that the knowledge was forced
upon him. Enlightenment came by the easy process of putting himself in
Ashley's place. "I wouldn't take my wife as a kind of free gift from
another fellow--I'll be hanged if I would! I'd marry her on my own or
not at all."

And unless Ashley assumed the responsibilities of his future wife's
position, he couldn't marry her "on his own." That much was clear. It
was also the most proper thing in the world. It was a right--a
privilege. He looked upon it chiefly as a privilege. Ashley would sell
his estate, and, having paid him, Davenant, the money he had advanced,
would send him about his business. There would be nothing left for him
but to disappear. The minute there was no need for him there would be no
place for him. He had been no more than the man who holds a horse till
the owner comes and rides away.

Worse than that reflection was the fear that his intervention had been
uncalled for in the first place. The belief that it was imperative had
been his sole excuse for forcing himself on people who fought against
his aid and professed themselves able to get along without it. But the
event seemed to show that if he had let things alone, Rupert Ashley
would have come and taken the burden on himself. As he was apparently
able to shoulder it, it would have been better to let him do it. In that
case he, Peter Davenant, would not have found himself in a position from
which he could not withdraw, while it was a humiliation to be dislodged
from it.

But, on the other hand, he would have missed his most wonderful
experience. There was that side to it, too. He would not have had these
moments face to face with Olivia Guion which were to be as food for his
sustenance all the rest of his life. During these days of discussion, of
argument, of conflict between his will and hers, he had the entirely
conscious sense that he was laying up the treasure on which his heart
would live as long as it continued to beat. The fact that she found
intercourse with him more or less distasteful became a secondary matter.
To be in her presence was the thing essential, whatever the grounds on
which he was admitted there. In this way he could store up her looks,
her words, her gestures, against the time when the memory of them would
be all he should have. As for her proposals of friendship made to him
that day--her suggestions of visits to be paid to Ashley and herself,
with introductions to a greater world--he swept them aside. He quite
understood that she was offering him the two mites that make a farthing
out of the penury of her resources, and, while he was touched by the
attempt to pay him, he didn't want them.

He had said, and said again, that he didn't want anything at all.
Neither did he. It would have been enough for him to go on as he was
going now--to fetch and carry, to meet lawyers and pacify creditors, to
protect her father because he _was_ her father, and get a glimpse of her
or a word from her when he came on his errands to Tory Hill. There were
analogies between his devotion and the adoration of a mortal for a
goddess beyond the stars. Like Hippolytus, he would have been content
that his Artemis should never step down from her shrine so long as he
was permitted to lay his gifts on her altar.

At least, he had felt so till to-day. He had begun the adventure in the
strength of the desire born of his visit to the scene of his father's
work at Hankow to do a little good. True, it was an impulse of which he
was more than half ashamed. Its mere formulation in words rendered it
bumptious and presumptuous. Beyond the confession made to Rodney Temple
on the night of his arrival no force could have induced him to avow it.
Better any imputation of craft than the suspicion of wanting to confer
benefits on his fellow-men. It was a satisfaction to him to be able to
say, even in his own inner consciousness, that the desperate state of
Guion's affairs forced his hand and compelled him to a quixotic course
which he would not otherwise have taken.

The first glimpse of Ashley brought this verbal shelter to the dust. So
long as the accepted lover had been but an abstract conception Davenant
had been able to think of him with toleration. But in presence of the
actual man the feeling of antagonism was instinctive, animal,
instantaneous. Though he pumped up his phrases of welcome to a
heartiness he did not feel, he was already saying to himself that his
brief day of romance was done. "He's going to squeeze me out." With this
alert and capable soldier on the spot, there would be no need for a
clumsy interloper any longer. They could do without him, and would be
glad to see him go.

The upshot of it all was that he must retire. It was not only the part
of tact, but a gentleman could do no less. Ashley had all the rights and
powers. The effort to withstand him would be worse than ineffectual, it
would be graceless. In Miss Guion's eyes it would be a blunder even more
unpardonable than that for which her punishment had been in some ways
the ruling factor in his life. He was sure she would not so punish him
again, but her disdain would not be needed. Merely to be _de trop_ in
her sight, merely to be troublesome, would be a chastisement from which
he should suffer all the stings of shame. If he was to go on serving her
with the disinterestedness of which, to himself at any rate, he had made
a boast, if he was to keep the kindly feeling she had perhaps begun to
entertain for him, he must resign his provisional authority into
Ashley's hands and efface himself.

To do that would be easy. He had only to advance by a few weeks his
departure for Stoughton, Michigan, where he meant to return in any case.
It was the familiar field of those opportunities in copper which he
hoped to profit by again. Once he was on that ground, Olivia Guion and
her concerns would be as much a part of a magic past as the woods and
mountains of a holiday are to a man nailed down at an office desk. With
a very little explanation to Ashley he could turn his back on the whole
business and give himself up to his own affairs.

He made an effort to recapture his zest in the old game, but after the
passionate interest he had put into the past week the fun was out of it.
Stoughton, Michigan, presented itself as a ramshackled, filthy wooden
town of bar-rooms, eating-rooms, pool-rooms, and unspeakable hotels. The
joys and excitements he had known over such deals as the buying and
selling of the Catapult, the Peppermint, and the Etna mines were as flat
now as the lees of yesternight's feast. "I'm not in love with her," he
kept saying, doggedly, to himself; and yet the thought of leaving Olivia
Guion and her interests to this intrusive stranger, merely because he
was supposed to have a prior claim, was sickening. It was more
sickening still that the Englishman should not only be disposed to take
up all the responsibilities Davenant would be laying down, but seemed
competent to do it.

On the embankment he met Rodney Temple, taking the air after his day in
the Gallery of Fine Arts. He walked slowly, with a stoop, his hands
behind him. Now and then he paused to enjoy the last tints of pink and
purple and dusky saffron mirrored in the reaches of the river or to
watch the swing of some college crew and the swan-like movement of their
long, frail shell.

"Hello! Where are you off to? Home?"

Davenant had not yet raised this question with himself, but now that it
was before him he saw it was worth considering. Home, for the present,
meant Drusilla and Mrs. Temple, with their intuitions and speculations,
their hints and sympathies. He scarcely knew which he dreaded most, the
old lady's inquisitive tenderness or Drusilla's unsparing perspicacity.

"Not home just yet, sir," he had the wit to say. "In fact, I'm walking
in to Boston, and may not be home to dinner. Perhaps you'll tell Mrs.
Temple so when you go in. Then I sha'n't have to 'phone her."

Temple let that pass. "Been up to look at the great man?"

Peter nodded. "Just come from there."

"And what do you make of him?"

"Oh, he's a decent sort."

"Not going to back out, eh?"

"Not at all; just the other way: he wants to step in and take everything
off--off our hands."

"You don't say so. Then he's what you say--a decent sort."

"He's more than that," Davenant heard himself saying, to his own
surprise. "He's a fine specimen of his type, and the type itself--"

"Is superb," the old man concluded. "That's about what I supposed he'd
be. You could hardly imagine Olivia Guion picking out any other
kind--especially as it's a kind that's as thick as blackberries in their
army."

Davenant corroborated this by a brief account of what Ashley proposed to
do. Light gleamed in the old man's eyes and a smile broke the shaggy
crevice between his beard and mustache as he listened.

"Splendid! Splendid!" he commented, now at one point and now at another
of the information Peter was imparting. "Sell his estate and pay up?
That's downright sporting, isn't it?"

"Oh, he's sporting enough."

"And what a grand thing for you to get your money back. I thought you
would some day--if Vic de Melcourt ever came to hear of what you'd done;
but I didn't expect it so soon."

Davenant turned away. "I wasn't in a hurry."

"No; but he is. That's the point. That's where the beauty of it comes in
for Olivia and you."

Peter looked blank. "Olivia and--_me_?"

"He's doing right," the old man explained, taking hold of the lapel of
Davenant's coat, "or what he conceives to be right; and no one man can
do that without putting us into a better position all round. Doing
right," he continued, emphasizing his words by shaking the lapel and
hammering on Peter's breast--"doing right is the solution of all the
difficulties into which we get ourselves tied up by shilly-shallying and
doing wrong. If Ashley were to hang fire you wouldn't know where the
devil you were. But now that he's going straight, it leaves you free to
do the same."

"It leaves me free to cut and run." He made little effort to conceal his
bitterness.

"Then cut and run, if that's what you feel impelled to do. You won't run
far before you see you're running to a purpose. I'll cut and run, too,"
he added, cheerfully. "I'll be off to see Olivia, and tell her she's
made a catch."

Davenant was glad to be able to resume his tramp. "Poor old chap," he
said to himself; "a lot he knows about it! It's damned easy to do right
when you've got everything your own way."

Having everything his own way was the happy position in which he placed
Rupert Ashley, seeing he was able to marry Olivia Guion by the simple
process of selling an estate. There was no more to that in Davenant's
estimation than to his own light parting with his stocks and bonds.
Whatever sacrifice the act might entail would have ample compensation,
since the giving up of the temporal and non-essential would secure
supreme and everlasting bliss. He would gladly have spared a hand or an
eye for a mere chance at the same reward.

Arrived in Boston there was nothing for him to do but to eat an
expensive dinner at a restaurant and go back again. He did not return on
foot. He had had enough of his own thoughts. They led him round and
round in a circle without end. He was ashamed, too, to perceive that
they concerned themselves chiefly, not with his love for Olivia Guion,
but with his enmity to Rupert Ashley. It was the first time in his life
that he was ever possessed by the fury to kill a man. He wouldn't have
been satisfied to be rid of Ashley; he wanted to leap on him, to strike
him, to choke him, to beat him to death. Sitting with his eyes fixed on
the table-cloth, from which the waiter had removed everything but the
finger-bowl and the bill, and allowing the cigar that protruded between
his knuckles to burn uselessly, he had already indulged in these
imaginary exercises, not a little to his relief, before he shook himself
and muttered: "I'm a damned fool."

The repetition of this statement, together with the dull belief that
repetition engenders, braced him at last to paying his bill and taking
the tram-car to Waverton. He had formed a resolution. It was still
early, scarcely later than the hour at which he usually dined. He had a
long evening before him. He would put it to use by packing his
belongings. Then he would disappear. He might go at once to Stoughton,
or he might travel no farther than the rooms he had engaged, and which
he had occupied in former years, on the less attractive slope of Beacon
Hill. It would be all the same. He would be out of the circle of
interests that centered round Olivia Guion, and so free to come back to
his senses.

He got so much elation out of this resolve that from the electric car to
Rodney Temple's house he walked with a swinging stride, whistling
tunelessly beneath his breath. He tried to think he was delivered from
an extraordinary obsession and restored to health and sanity. He planned
to initiate Ashley as the new _chargé d'affaires_ without the necessity
on his part of seeing Miss Guion again.

And yet, when he opened the door with his latch-key and saw a note lying
on the table in the hail, his heart bounded as though it meant to stop
beating. It was sheer premonition that made him think the letter was for
him. He stooped and read the address before he had taken off his hat and
while he was still tugging at his gloves:

Peter Davenant, Esq.,
31 Charlesbank.

It was premonition again that told him the contents before he had read a
line:

     DEAR MR. DAVENANT,--If you are quite free this evening, could you
     look in on me again? Don't come unless you have really nothing else
     to do. Yours sincerely,

     OLIVIA GUION.

He looked at his watch. It was only half-past eight. "I've no excuse for
not going," he said to himself. He made it clear to his heart that he
regretted the necessity. After the brave decisions to which he had
come, decisions which he might have put into execution, it was a call
backward, a retrogression. He began already to be afraid that he might
not be so resolute a second time. But he had no excuse for not going.
That fact took the matter out of his hands. There was nothing to do but
to crumple the letter into his pocket, take down his evening overcoat
from its peg, and leave the house before any one knew he had entered.

The night was mild. It was so soft and scented that it might have been
in June. From the stars and the street-lamps and the line of electrics
along the water's edge there was just light enough to show the surface
of the river, dim and metallic, and the wisps of vapor hovering above
the marshes. In the east, toward Cambridge and beyond Boston, the sky
was bright with the simulation of the dawn that precedes the moonrise.

His heart was curiously heavy. If he walked rapidly it was none the less
reluctantly. For the first time since he had taken part and lot in the
matter in hand he had no confidence in himself. He had ceased to be able
to say, "I'm not in love with her," while he had no other strengthening
formula to put in its place.

Algonquin Avenue, which older residents still called Rodney Lane, was as
still and deserted as a country road. The entry gate to Tory Hill
clicked behind him with curious, lonely loudness. The gravel crunched in
the same way beneath his tread. Looking up at the house, he saw neither
light nor sign of living. There was something stricken and sinister
about the place.

He was half-way toward the front door when a white figure came forward
beneath the Corinthian portico. If it had not been so white he couldn't
have seen it.

"I'm here, Mr. Davenant."

The voice, too, sounded lonely, like a voice in a vast, empty house. He
crossed the lawn to the portico. Olivia had already reseated herself in
the wicker chair from which she had risen at his approach.

"Aren't you afraid of taking cold?" She had not offered him her hand;
both hands were hidden in the folds of her voluminous wrap. He said the
simplest thing he could think of.

"No. I'm wearing a very warm fur-lined cloak. It's very long, too. I
couldn't stay indoors. The house seemed so--so dead."

"Is there nobody with you?"

"Colonel Ashley went back to town before dinner. Papa wasn't quite so
well. He's trying to sleep. Will you sit down on the step, or go in and
bring out a chair? But perhaps you'll find it chilly. If so, we'll go
in."

She half rose, but he checked her. "Not at all. I like it here. It's one
of our wonderful, old-fashioned Octobers, isn't it? Besides, I've got an
overcoat."

He threw the coat over his shoulders, seating himself on the floor, with
his feet on the steps below him and his back to one of the fluted
Corinthian pilasters. The shadow was so deep on this side of the
house--the side remote from the approaching moonrise--that they could
see each other but dimly. Of the two she was the more visible, not only
because she was in white, but because of the light coming through the
open sitting-room behind her from the hail in the middle of the house.
In this faint glimmer he could see the pose of her figure in the deep
wicker arm-chair and the set of her neat head with its heavy coil of
hair.

"I asked you to come," she said, simply, "because I feel so helpless."

"That's a very good reason," he responded, guardedly. "I'm glad you
thought of me, rather than of any one else."

He was pleased to note that even to his own ears his accent was polite,
but no more. At the same minute he found the useful formula he had been
in search of--"I mustn't let her know I'm in love with her."

"There's no one else for me to think of," she explained, in self-excuse.
"If there were, I shouldn't bother you."

"That's not so kind," he said, keeping to the tone of conventional
gallantry.

"I don't mean that I haven't plenty of friends. I know lots of
people--naturally; but I don't know them in a way to appeal to them like
this."

"Then so much the better for me."

"That's not a reason for my imposing on your kindness; and yet I'm
afraid I must go on doing it. I feel like a person in such desperate
straits for ready money that he's reckless of the rate of interest. Not
that it's a question of money now--exactly."

"It doesn't matter what it's a case of. I'm at your service, Miss
Guion--"

"I know. That's why I asked you to come. I want you to keep Colonel
Ashley from doing what he proposed this afternoon."

She spoke more abruptly, more nervously, than was her habit.

"I would if I could; but I don't know that I've any way of dissuading
him."

"You needn't dissuade him. You've simply to refuse to take his money."

"It's not quite so easy as that, because there's no direct business
between him and me. If Mr. Guion wanted to pay me what I've lent him, I
couldn't decline to accept it. Do you see?"

In the dim light he noticed her head nodding slowly. "Oh, so that's the
way it is? It would have to be done through papa?"

"It would have to be done through him. And if he preferred to use
Colonel Ashley's money rather than mine, I should have nothing at all to
say."

"I see; I see," she commented, thoughtfully. "And I don't know how papa
would feel about it, or how far I could count on him."

For a few minutes Davenant said nothing. When he spoke it was with some
amazement at his own temerity. "I thought you didn't want my help, if
you could possibly get any other?"

The words took her by surprise. He could see her draw her cloak more
tightly about her, her hands still within its folds.

"I felt that way at first. I don't now. Perhaps I understand you a
little better. But, in any case, I couldn't take his."

He pushed the liberty a little further. "But if you're going to marry
him--"

"That's just it. I wonder if you've the faintest idea of what it means
to a woman to marry a man by making herself a burden to him in
advance--and such a burden!"

"It wouldn't be a burden to any one who--who--"

"I know what you're going to say. Love does make a difference. Of
course. But it acts one way on the man and another way on the woman. In
proportion as it urges him to make the sacrifice, it impels her to
prevent it."

He grew still bolder. The cover of the night and the intimacy of the
situation made him venturesome. "Then why don't you break off your
engagement?"

It was a long while before she answered. "He won't let me," she said
then. "And, besides," she added, after slight hesitation, "it's
difficult not to be true to a man who's showing himself so noble."

"Is that your only reason?"

She raised her head slightly and turned toward him. He expected
something cutting, but she only said: "What makes you ask that?"

He was a little frightened. He backed down, and yet not altogether. "Oh,
nothing. I only--wondered."

"If you think I don't care for him--"

"Oh no. Not that--not that at all."

"Well, if you _were_ to think it, it would probably be because I've been
through so much--I'm _going_ through so much--that that sort of thing
has become secondary."

"I didn't know that--that sort of thing--was ever secondary."

"Because you've never had the experience. If you had--"

The freedom of speech she seemed to be according him led him on to say:

"I've had experience enough--as you may know--to be sure it wouldn't be
secondary with me."

She seemed willing to discuss the point. "When I say secondary I mean
that I'm in a position in which I find it isn't the most important thing
in the world to me to marry the man I--I care for."

"Then, what _is_ the most important thing?"

She stirred impatiently. "Oh, it's no use going into that; I suppose it
would be--to be free--not to owe you anything--or anybody anything--to
be out of this big, useless house--away from these unpaid
servants--and--and free! I'm not a dependent person. I dare say you've
noticed that. I shouldn't mind having no money. I know a way by which I
could support myself--and papa. I've thought that out. I shouldn't mind
being alone in the world, either--if I could only burst the coil that's
been wound about me."

"But since you can't," he said, rather cruelly, "wouldn't the next best
thing be--to marry the man you care for?"

Her response was to say, irrelevantly, somewhat quaveringly, in a voice
as near to tears as he could fancy her coming: "I wish I hadn't fallen
out with Aunt Vic."

"Why? Would she help you?"

"She's very good and kind--in her way."

"Why don't you write to her?"

"Writing wouldn't be any good now. It's too late."

Another long silence fell between them. The darkened windows of the
house on the other side of the lawn began to reflect a pallid gleam as
the moon rose. Shadows of trees and of clumps of shrubbery became
faintly visible on the grass. The great rounded elm in the foreground
detached itself against the shimmering, illuminated sky like an open
fan. Davenant found something ecstatic in the half-light, the peace, and
the extraordinary privilege of being alone with her. It would be one
more memory to treasure up. Silence, too, was a form of communion more
satisfactory to him than speech. It was so full of unutterable things
that he wondered at her allowing it to last.

Nevertheless, it was he who broke it. The evening grew chilly at last.
Somewhere in the town a clock struck ten. He felt it would be indiscreet
to stay longer.

"I'll make a try for it, Miss Guion," he said, when he had got on his
feet to go away. "Since you want me to see Colonel Ashley, I will."

"They always say that one man has such influence on another," she said,
rising, too--"and you see things so clearly and have such a lot of
common sense.... I'll walk down to the gate with you.... I'm tired with
sitting still."

He offered his hand to help her in descending the portico steps. Though
there was no need for her to take it, she did so. The white cloak,
loosely gathered in one hand in front, trailed behind her. He thought
her very spirit-like and ethereal.

At the foot of the steps his heart gave a great bound; he went hot and
cold. It seemed to him--he was sure--he could have sworn--that her hand
rested in his a perceptible instant longer than there was any need for.

A moment later he was scoffing at the miracle. It was a mistake on his
part, or an accident on hers. It was the mocking of his own desire, the
illusion of his feverish, overstrained senses. It was a restorative to
say to himself: "Don't be a damned fool."

And yet they walked to the gate almost in silence. It was a silence
without embarrassment, like that which had preceded it. It had some of
the qualities of the silence which goes with long-established
companionships. He spoke but once, to remind her, protectingly, that the
grass was damp, and to draw her--almost tactually--to the graveled path.

They came to the gate, but he did not immediately say good night.

"I wish you could throw the burden of the whole thing on me, Miss
Guion," he ventured, wistfully, "and just take it easy."

She looked away from him, over the sprinkling of lights that showed the
town. "If I could do it with any one, it would be with you--now."

There was an inflection on the _now_ which again gave him strange and
sudden thrills, as though some extraordinary chemical agent had been
infused into his blood. All kinds of capitulations were implied in
it--changes of heart and mind and attitude--changes that had come about
imperceptibly, and for reasons which he, and perhaps she, could not have
followed. He felt the upleaping of great joy. It was joy so intense that
it made him tactful, temperate. It also made him want to rush away and
be alone.

"I'll make that do for the present," he said, smiling down at her
through the darkness. "Thank you for letting me come. Good night."

"Good night."

There was again that barely noticeable lingering of her hand in his. The
repetition rather disappointed him. "It's just her way of shaking
hands," was the explanation he gave of it.

When he had passed out of the gate he pretended to take his way down
Algonquin Avenue, but he only crossed the Street to the shelter of a
friendly elm. There he could watch her tall, white figure as it went
slowly up the driveway. Except for a dim light in the fan-shaped window
over the front door the house was dark. The white figure moved with an
air of dragging itself along.

"It isn't the most important thing in the world for her," he whispered
to himself, "to marry--_the man she cares for_."

There was a renewal of his blind fury against Ashley, while at the same
time he found himself groaning, inwardly: "I wish to God the man she
cares for wasn't such a--such a--trump!"




XVIII


When the colonel of the Sussex Rangers woke on the following morning the
Umfraville element in him, fatigued doubtless with the demands of the
previous day, still slept on. That strain in him which had made his
maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers
in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second,
and roysterers with George the Fourth--loyal, swashbuckling, and
impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief
one day or another, as they had come--that strain lying dormant, Ashley
was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes. In other
words he woke in alarm. It was very real alarm. It was alarm not unlike
that of the gambler who realizes in the cold stare of morning that for a
night's excitement he has thrown away a fortune.

The feeling was so dreadful that, as he lay for a few minutes with his
eyes closed, he could say without exaggeration that he had never felt
anything so sickening in his life. It was worse than the blue funk that
attended the reveille for his first battle--worse than the bluer remorse
that had come with the dawn after some of his more youthful sprees. The
only parallel to it he could find was in the desolation of poor
creatures he had seen, chiefly in India, reduced suddenly by fire,
flood, or earthquake to the skin they stood in and a lodging on the
ground. His swaggering promises of yesterday had brought him as near as
possible to that.

Fortunately, when he had sprung out of bed the feeling became less
poignant. By the time he had had his bath and his breakfast it had got
itself within the limits of what could be expressed in the statement:
"I've been a jolly ass."

Though there was no denying this fact, he could nevertheless use the
reproach in its precise signification. He was not a jolly ass because he
had remained true to Olivia Guion, but because of the extravagant
methods of his faithfulness. No one but an Umfraville, he declared,
would have hesitated to accept the _status quo_. Considering that in
spite of everything he was still eager to give Olivia the shelter of his
name and the advantages of his position, his insistence on doing more
fell short of the grotesque.

Nevertheless he had insisted on it, and it was too late to shrink from
making good his offer. No doubt, if he did so shrink, Olivia would
commend him; but it would be a commendation not inconsistent with a fall
in her esteem. His nerves still tingled with the joy of hearing her say,
as she had said yesterday: "You're the noblest man in the world; I never
dreamed there could be any one like you." She was so sparing with her
words that these meant more from her than from another. If she used
them, it was because she thought he _was_ the noblest man in the world
and because he _did_ surpass her dreams. This was setting up the
standard in a way that permitted no falling short of it. He must be
Rupert Ashley at his best even if the world went to pieces while he made
the attempt. Moreover, if he failed, there was always Peter Davenant
ready to loom up above him. "I must keep higher than him," he said to
himself, "whatever it costs me." So, little by little, the Umfraville in
him also woke, with its daredevil chivalry. It might be said to have
urged him on, while the Ashley prudence held him back, when from his
room in the hotel he communicated by telephone with Olivia, begging her
to arrange an interview between Guion and himself about eleven o'clock.

       *       *       *       *       *

On taking the message to her father Olivia found him awake, but still in
bed. Since his downfall had become generally known, she had noticed a
reluctance on his part to get up. It was true he was not well; but his
shrinking from activity was beyond what his degree of illness warranted.
It was a day or two before she learned to view this seeming indolence as
nothing but the desire to creep, for as many hours as possible out of
the twenty-four, into the only refuge left to him. In his bed he was
comparatively safe, not from the law, which he no longer had to fear,
but from intrusion and inspection, and, above all, from sympathy.

It was between nine and ten o'clock. The blinds were up, the windows
open, and the sunshine was streaming in. A tray with his scarcely
tasted breakfast on it stood beside the bed. Guion lay on his back, his
head sunk deep into the pillows. Though his face was turned from the
door and his eyes closed, Olivia knew he was not sleeping. After
performing small tasks in the room, carrying the breakfast tray into the
hall, and lowering the blinds, she sat down at the bedside.

"Papa, darling."

As he turned his head slowly she thought his eyes had the look of mortal
ennui that Rembrandt depicts in those of Lazarus rising from the tomb
and coming back to life.

She delivered her message, to which he replied, "He can come."

"I think I ought to tell you," she continued, "what he's coming for."

She gave him the gist of her conversation with Ashley on the previous
day and the one great decision to which they had led him up. It would
have gratified Ashley, could he have overheard, to note the skill with
which she conveyed precisely that quality of noble precipitancy in his
words and resolutions which he himself feared they had lacked. If a
slight suspicion could have risen in his mind, it would have been that
of a certain haste on her part to forestall any possible questioning of
his eagerness such as he had occasion to observe in himself. That might
have wounded him.

"So he wants to go ahead," Guion said, when she had finished.

"Apparently."

"Can't he do that and still leave things as they are?"

"He seems to think he can't."

"I don't see why. If I have to owe the money to any one, I'd rather owe
it to Davenant."

"So should I."

"Do you really want to marry him?"

The question startled her. "Marry him? Who?"

There was a look almost of humor in Guion's forlorn eyes. "Well, I
didn't mean Davenant. I didn't suppose there was any--"

"Papa, darling," she hastened to say, "as things are at present I'd
rather not marry any one at all. There's so much for me to do in getting
life on another footing for us both that marriage seems to belong to
another kind of world."

He raised himself on his elbow, turning toward her. "Then why don't you
tell him so?"

"I have; but he won't take that as a reason. And, besides, I've said I
_would_ marry him if he'd give up this wild project--"

"But you're in love with him, aren't you? You may as well tell me," he
continued, as she colored. "I must have _some_ data to go on."

"I--I _was_ in love with him," she faltered. "I suppose I am still. But
while everything is as it is, I--I--can't tell; I--I don't know.
I'm--I'm feeling so many other things that I don't know whether I
feel--feel love--or not. I dare say I do. But it's like asking a man if
he's fond of playing a certain game when he thinks he's going to die."

He slipped down into bed again, pulling the coverlet about his chin and
turning his face away. As he said nothing more, she rose to go. "About
eleven, then, papa dear."

She could hear a muffled assent as she left the room. She was afraid he
was crying.

Nevertheless, when she had gone Guion rang for Reynolds and made his
usual careful toilet with uncommon elaboration. By the time his guest
arrived he was brushed and curled and stretched on the couch. If he had
in the back of his mind a hope of impressing Ashley and showing him that
if he, Guion, had fallen, it was from a height, he couldn't help it. To
be impressive was the habit of his life--a habit it was too late now to
overcome. Had he taken the Strange Ride with Morrowby Jukes, he would
have been impressive among the living dead. Curiously enough, too, now
that that possibility was past, he wondered if he didn't regret it. He
confessed as much to Ashley.

"I know what you've come for," he said, when Ashley, who had declined a
cigar, seated himself beside the couch.

"That means, I suppose, that Olivia has got ahead of me."

"She told me what you've proposed. It's very fine--very sporting."

"I haven't proposed it because it's either sporting or fine. It seems to
me the only thing to do."

"Y-es; I can understand that you should feel so about it. I should
myself if I were in your place and had a right to be generous. The
trouble is--that it wouldn't work."

Ashley would have given much not to feel this sudden exhilaration of
relief. It was so glowing that, in spite of his repugnance, he could
have leaned forward and wrung Guion's hand. He contrived, however, to
throw a tone of objection into his voice as he said: "Wouldn't work? Why
not?"

Guion raised himself on his elbow. "It's no use going over the arguments
as to the effect on your position. You've considered all that, no doubt,
and feel that you can meet it. Whether you could or not when it came to
the point is another question. But no matter. There are one or two
things you haven't considered. I hate to put them before you,
because--well, because you're a fine fellow--and it's too bad that you
should be in this fix. It's part of my--my--my chastisement--to have put
you there; but it'll be something to me--some alleviation; if you can
understand--to help to get you out."

Ashley was dumb. He was also uncomfortable. He hated this sort of thing.

Guion continued. "Suppose I were to let you go ahead on this--let you
raise the money--and take it from you--and pay Davenant--and all
that--then you might marry my daughter, and get life on some sort of
tolerable working basis. I dare say." He pulled himself forward on the
couch. Ashley noticed the blazing of his eyes and hectic color in his
cheeks. "You might even be happy, in a way," he went on, "if you didn't
have--_me_."

"Didn't have--you? I don't understand--"

"And you'd _have_ me. You couldn't get out of it. I'm done for--I'm no
good to any one any more--but I'm not going to die. That's my point.
That's my punishment, too. Can't you imagine what it means to a man like
me--who used to think well of himself--who's been well thought of--can't
you imagine what it is to have to inspire every one who belongs to him
with loathing? That's what I've got to do for the rest of my life--and
I'm going to _live_."

"Oh, I say!"

"You mayn't believe it, Ashley, but I'd rather have been--shut up--put
away--where people couldn't see me--where I didn't have to see them. You
know Olivia and I were facing that. I expect she's told you. And 'pon my
soul there are many ways in which it would have been easier than--than
this. But that's not what I'm coming to. The great fact is that after
you'd counted your cost and done your utmost you still have _me_--like a
dead rat strung round your neck--"

"Oh, I say, by Jove!"

"Olivia, poor child, has to bear it. She can, too. That's a remarkable
thing about us New England people--our grit in the face of disgrace. I
fancy there are many of our women who'd be as plucky as she--and I know
one man. I don't know any others."

Ashley felt sick. He had never in his life felt such repulsion as toward
what seemed to him this facile, theatrical remorse. If Guion was really
contrite, if he really wanted to relieve the world of his presence, he
could blow his brains out. Ashley had known, or known of, so many who
had resorted to this ready remedy for a desperate plight that it seemed
simple. His thoughts were too complex, however, for immediate
expression, and, before he could decide what to respond, Guion said:

"Why don't you give him a chance?"

Ashley was startled. "Chance? What chance? Who?"

"Davenant."

Ashley grasped the back of his chair as though about to spring up.
"What's he want a chance for? Chance for what?"

"I might have said: 'Why don't you give _her_ a chance?' She's half in
love with him--as it is."

"That's a lie. That's an infernal lie."

Ashley was on his feet. He pushed the chair from him, though he still
grasped it. He seemed to need it for support. Guion showed no
resentment, continuing to speak with feverish quiet.

"I think you'll find that the whole thing is predestined, Ashley.
Davenant's coming to my aid is what you might call a miracle. I don't
like to use the expression--it sounds idiotic--and canting--and all
that--but, as a matter of fact, he came--as an answer to prayer."

Ashley gave a snort of impatience. Guion warmed to his subject, dragging
himself farther up on the couch and throwing the coverlet from his
knees.

"Yes, of course; you'd feel that way about it--naturally. So should I if
anybody else were to tell me. But this is how it happened. One night,
not long ago, while you were on the water, I was so hard hit that
I--well, I actually--_prayed_. I don't know that I ever did before--that
is, not really--_pray_. But I did then; and I didn't beat about the
bush, either. I didn't stop at half measures; I asked for a miracle
right out and out--and I got it. The next morning Davenant came with his
offer of the money. You may make what you like out of that; but I
make--"

"I make this, by Jove; that you and he entered into a bargain that he
should supply the cash, and you should--"

"Wrong!" With his arm stretched to its full length he pointed his
forefinger up into Ashley's face. "Wrong!" he cried, again. "I asked him
if she had anything to do with it, and he said she hadn't."

"Pff! Would you expect him to acknowledge it? He might deny it till he
damned his soul with lies; but that wouldn't keep you and him from--"

"Before God, Ashley, I never thought of it till later. I know it looks
that way--the way you put it--but I never thought of it till later. I
dragged it out of him that he'd once been in love with her and had asked
her to marry him. That was a regular knock-down surprise to me. I'd had
no idea of anything of the kind. But he said he wasn't in love with her
any longer. I dare say he thinks he isn't; but--"

"Suppose he is; that needn't affect _her_--except as an impertinence. A
woman can defend herself against that sort of thing, by Jove!"

"It needn't affect her--only--only as a matter of fact--it does. It
appeals to her imagination. The big scale of the thing would impress
almost any woman. Look here, Ashley," he cried, with a touch of
hysteria; "it'll be better for us all in the long run if you'll give him
a chance. It'll be better for you than for any one else. You'll be well
out of it--any impartial person would tell you that. You must see it
yourself. You _do_ see it yourself. We're not your sort--"

But Ashley could stand it no longer. With a smothered, inarticulate
oath, he turned abruptly, and marched out of the room.




XIX


Fortunately there was no one in the upper hall, nor on the stairs, nor
in the lower hall, nor in the oval room into which Ashley stumbled his
way. The house was all sunshine and silence. He dropped into the nearest
arm-chair. "It's a lie," he kept repeating to himself. "It's a lie. It's
a damned, infernal lie. It's a put-up job between them--between the old
scoundrel and that--that oaf."

The reflection brought him comfort. By degrees it brought him a great
deal of comfort. That was the explanation, of course! There was no need
of his being panic-stricken. To frighten him off was part of their plan.
Had he not challenged her two or three times to say she didn't care for
him? If she had any doubt on the subject he had given her ample
opportunity to declare it. But she had not done so. On the contrary, she
had made him both positive and negative statements of her love. What
more could he ask?

He breathed again. The longer he thought of it the better his situation
seemed to grow. He had done all that an honorable man could think of. He
had been chivalrous to a quixotic degree. If they had not accepted his
generous proposals, then so much the worse for them. They--Guion and
Davenant--were pursuing obstructionist tactics, so as to put him in a
place where he could do nothing but retreat. Very well; he would show
them! There were points beyond which even chivalry could not go; and if
they found themselves tangled in their own barbed wire they themselves
would be to blame.

So, as the minute of foolish, jealous terror passed away, he began to
enjoy the mellow peace of the old house. It was the first thing he had
enjoyed since landing in America. His pleasure was largely in the
anticipation of soon leaving that country with all the honors and Olivia
Guion besides.

It was a gratification to the Ashley spirit, too, to note how promptly
the right thing had paid. It was really something to take to heart. The
moral to be drawn from his experiences at the heights of Dargal had been
illustrated over and over again in his career; and this was once more.
If he had funked the sacrifice it would have been on his conscience all
the rest of his life. As it was, he had made it, or practically made it,
and so could take his reward without scruple.

He put this plainly before Olivia when at last she appeared. She came
slowly through the hail from the direction of the dining-room, a
blank-book and a pencil in her hand.

"I'm making an inventory," she explained. "You know that everything will
have to be sold?"

He ignored this to hurry to his account of the interview with Guion. It
had been brief, he said, and in a certain sense unsatisfactory. He laid
stress on his regret that her father should have seen fit to decline his
offer--that's what it amounted to--but he pointed out to her that that
bounder Davenant, who had doubtless counseled this refusal, would now be
the victim of his own wiles. He had overreached himself. He had taken
one of those desperate risks to which the American speculative spirit is
so often tempted--and he had pushed it too far. He would lose everything
now, and serve him right!

"I've made my offer," he went on, in an injured tone, "and they've
thrown it out. I really can't do more, now, can I?"

"You know already how I feel about that."

They were still standing. He had been too eager to begin his report to
offer her a chair or to take one himself.

"They can't expect me to repeat it, now, can they?" he hurried on.
"There are limits, by Jove! I can't go begging to them--"

"I don't think they expect it."

"And yet, if I don't, you know--he's dished. He loses his money--and
everything else."

In putting a slight emphasis on the concluding words he watched her
closely. She betrayed herself to the extent of throwing back her head
with a little tilt to the chin.

"I don't believe he'd consider that being dished. He's the sort of man
who loses only when he--flings away."

"He's the sort of man who's a beastly cad."

He regretted these words as soon as they were uttered, but she had stung
him to the quick. Her next words did so again.

"Then, if so, I hope you won't find it necessary to repeat the
information. I mistook him for something very high--very high and noble;
and, if you don't mind, I'd rather go on doing it."

She swept him with a look such as he knew she must be capable of giving,
though he had never before seen it. The next second she had slipped
between the portières into the hail. He heard her pause there.

It was inevitable that Guion's words should return to him: "Half in love
with him--as it is."

"That's rot," he assured himself. He had only to call up the image of
Davenant's hulking figure and heavy ways to see what rot it was. He
himself was not vain of his appearance; he had too much to his credit to
be obliged to descend to that; but he knew he was a distinguished man,
and that he looked it. The woman who could choose between him and
Davenant would practically have no choice at all. That seemed to him
conclusive.

Nevertheless, it was with a view to settling this question beyond
resurrection that he followed her into the hall. He found her standing
with the note-book still in her hand.

He came softly behind her and looked over her shoulder, his face close
to hers. She could feel his breath on her cheek, but she tried to write.

"I'm sorry I said what I did," he whispered.

She stayed her pencil long enough to say: "I hope you're still sorrier
for having thought it."

"I'm sorry you _know_ I think it. Since it affects you so deeply--"

"It affects me deeply to see you can be unjust."

"I'm more than unjust. I'm--well you can fancy what I am, when I say
that I know some one who thinks you're more than half in love with this
fellow--as it is."

"Is that papa?"

"I don't see that it matters who it is. The only thing of importance is
whether you are or not."

"If you mean that as a question, I shall have to let you answer it
yourself."

"Would you tell me if--if you were?"

"What would be the use of telling you a thing that would make you
unhappy and that I couldn't help?"

"Am I to understand, then, that you _are_ half in love with him?"

She continued the effort to write.

"I think I've a right to press that question," he resumed. "Am I, or am
I not, to understand--"

She turned slowly. Her face was flushed, her eyes were misty.

"You may understand this," she said, keeping her voice as much under
control as possible, "you may understand this, that I don't know whom
I'm in love with, or whether or not I'm in love with any one. That's the
best I can say. I'm sorry, Rupert--but I don't think it's altogether my
fault. Papa's troubles seem to have transported me into a world where
they neither marry nor are given in marriage--where the whole subject is
alien to--"

"But you said," he protested, bitterly, "no longer ago than yesterday
that you--_loved_ me."

"And I suppose I do. I did in Southsea. I did--right up to the minute
when I learned what papa--and I--had been doing all these years--and
that if the law had been put in force--You see, that's made me feel as
if I were benumbed--as if I were frozen--or dead. You mustn't blame me
too much--"

"My darling, I'm not blaming you. I'm not such a duffer but that I can
understand how you feel. It'll be all right. You'll come round. This is
like an illness, by Jove!--that's what it's like. But you'll get better,
dear. After we're married--if you'll _only_ marry me--"

"I said I'd do that, Rupert--I said it yesterday--if you'd give up--what
I understand you _have_ given up--"

He was on his guard against admitting this. "I haven't given it up.
They've made it impossible for me to do it; that's all. It's their
action, not mine."

"It comes to the same thing. I'm ready to keep my promise."

"You don't say it with much enthusiasm."

"Perhaps I say it with something better. I think I do. At the same time
I wish--"

"You wish what?"

"I wish I had attached another condition to it."

"It mayn't be too late for that even now. Let's have it."

"If I had thought of it," she said, with a faint, uncertain smile, "I
should have exacted a promise that you and he should be--friends."

He spoke sharply. "Who? Me? That's a good 'un, by Jove! You may as well
understand me, dear, once and for all. I don't make friends of
cow-punchers of that sort."

"I do," she said, coldly, turning again to her note-book.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was not strange that Ashley should pass the remainder of the day in a
state of irritation against what he called "this American way of doing
things." Neither was it strange that when, after dinner in the evening,
Davenant kept close to him as they were leaving Rodney Temple's house,
the act should have struck the Englishman as a bit of odious
presumption. Having tried vainly to shake his companion off, he was
obliged to submit to walking along the Embankment with him, side by
side.

He had not found the dinner an entertaining event. Drusilla talked a
great deal, but was uneasy and distraite. Rodney Temple seemed to him "a
queer old cove," while Mrs. Temple made no impression on him at all.
Olivia had urged her inability to leave her father as an excuse for not
coming. Davenant said little beyond giving the information that he was
taking leave of his host and hostess to sleep that night in his old
quarters in Boston and proceed next day to Stoughton, Michigan. This
fact gave him a pretext for saying good night when Ashley did and
leaving the house in his company.

"We're going the same way, aren't we?" he asked, as soon as they were
outside.

"No," Ashley said, promptly; "you're taking the tram, and I shall walk."

"I should like to walk, too, Colonel, if you don't mind."

Since silence raised the most telling objection, Ashley made no reply.
Taking out his cigarette-case, he lit a cigarette, without offering one
to his companion. The discourtesy was significant, but Davenant ignored
it, commenting on the extraordinary mildness of the October night and
giving items of information as to the normal behavior of American autumn
weather. As Ashley expressed no appreciation of these data, the subject
was dropped. There was a long silence before Davenant nerved himself to
begin on the topic he had sought this opportunity to broach.

"You said yesterday, Colonel, that you'd like to pay me back the money
I've advanced to Mr. Guion. I'd just as soon you wouldn't, you know."

Ashley deigned no answer. The tramp went on in silence broken only by
distant voices or a snatch of song from a students' club-house near the
river. Somewhere in the direction of Brookline a locomotive kept up a
puffing like the beating of a pulse.

"I don't need that money," Davenant began again. "There's more where it
came from. I shall be out after it--from to-morrow on."

Ashley's silence was less from rudeness than from self-restraint. All
his nerves were taut with the need to visit his troubles on some one's
head. A soldiering life had not accustomed him to indefinite repression
of his irritable impulses, and now after two or three days of it he was
at the limit of his powers. It was partly because he knew his patience
to be nearly at an end that he wanted to be alone. It was also because
he was afraid of the blind fury with which Davenant's mere presence
inspired him. While he expressed this fury to himself in epithets of
scorn, he was aware, too, that there were shades of animosity in it for
which he had no ready supply of terms. Such exclamatory fragments as
forced themselves up through the troubled incoherence of his thoughts
were of the nature of "damned American," "vulgar Yankee," "insolent
bounder," rendering but inadequately the sentiments of a certain kind of
Englishman toward his fancied typical American, a crafty Colossus who
accomplishes everything by money and brutal strength. Had there been
nothing whatever to create a special antagonism between them, Ashley's
feeling toward Davenant would still have been that of a civilized
Jack-the-Giant-Killer toward a stupendous, uncouth foe. It would have
had elements in it of fear, jealousy, even of admiration, making at its
best for suspicion and neutrality, and at its worst for.... But Davenant
spoke again.

"I'd a great deal rather, Colonel, that--"

The very sound of his voice, with its harsh consonants and its absurd
repetitions of the military title, grated insufferably on Ashley's ear.
He was beyond himself although he seemed cool.

"My good fellow, I don't care a hang what you'd a great deal rather."

Ashley lit a fresh cigarette with the end of the old one, throwing the
stump into the river almost across Davenant's face, as the latter walked
the nearer to the railing.

The American turned slightly and looked down. The action, taken in
conjunction with his height and size and his refusal to be moved,
intensified Ashley's rage, which began now to round on himself. Even the
monotonous tramp-tramp of their footsteps, as the Embankment became more
deserted, got on his nerves. It was long before Davenant made a new
attempt to fulfil his mission.

"In saying what I said just now," he began, in what he tried to make a
reasonable tone, "I've no ax to grind for myself. If Miss Guion--"

"We'll leave that name out," Ashley cried, sharply. "Only a damned cad
would introduce it."

Though the movement with which Davenant swung his left arm through the
darkness and with the back of his left hand struck Ashley on the mouth
was so sudden as to surprise no one more than himself, it came with all
the cumulative effect of twenty-four hours' brooding. The same might be
said of the spring with which Ashley bounded on his adversary. It had
the agility and strength of a leopard's. Before Davenant had time to
realize what he had done he found himself staggering--hurled against the
iron railing, which threatened to give way beneath his weight. He had
not taken breath when he was flung again. In the dim light of the
electrics he could see the glare in Ashley's eyes and hear him panting.
Davenant, too, panted, but his wrath that had flared up like a rocket
had already come down like a stick.

"Look here," he stammered; "we--we--c-can't do this sort of thing."

Ashley fell back. He, too, seemed to realize quickly the folly of the
situation. When he spoke it was less in anger than in protest.

"By God, you struck me!"

"I didn't know it, Colonel. If I did, we're quits on
it--because--because you insulted me. Perhaps you didn't know _that_.
I'm willing to think you didn't--if you'll only believe that the whole
thing has been a mistake--a damned, idiotic, tom-fool mistake."

The words had their effect. Ashley fell back still farther. There was a
sinking of his head and a shrinking of his figure that told of reaction
from the moment of physical excess.

A roadside bench was visible beneath an arc-lamp but a few yards away.
"Come and sit down," Davenant said, hoarsely. He found it difficult to
speak.

Ashley stumbled along. He sat down heavily, like a man spent with
fatigue or drink. With his elbows on his knees, he hid his face in his
hands, while his body rocked.

Davenant turned away, walking down the Embankment. He walked on for
fifty or sixty yards. He himself felt a curious sense of being battered
and used up. His heart pounded and the perspiration stood on his brow.
Putting his hand to his collar, he found his evening cravat awry and
his waistcoat pulled out of shape.

He grasped the rail, as if for support, looking off with unseeing eyes
into the night. Lights along the river-side were reflected in the water;
here and there a bridge made a long low arch of lamps; more lights
sprinkled the suburban hills, making a fringe to the pall of stars. They
grew pale, even while he looked at them, as before a brighter radiance,
and he knew that behind him the moon was coming up. He thought of the
moonrise of the previous evening, when Olivia Guion had walked with him
to the gate and let her hand rest in his. He recalled her words, as he
had recalled them a hundred times that day, "_The man I care for_." He
went back over each phase of their conversation, as though it was
something he was trying to learn by heart. He remembered her longing for
her aunt de Melcourt.

All at once he struck the railing with the energy of a man who has a new
inspiration. "By George!" he said, half aloud, "that's an idea--that's
certainly an idea! I wonder if.... The _Indiana_ sailed last week ... it
ought to be the turn of the _Louisiana_ the day after to-morrow. By
George, I believe I could make it if ..."

He hurried back to the bench where Ashley was still sitting. The latter
was upright now, his arm stretched along the back. He had lit a
cigarette.

Davenant approached to within a few feet. "Look here, Colonel," he said,
gently, "we've got to forget this evening."

It was a minute or two before Ashley said: "What's the good of
forgetting one thing when there are so many others to remember?"

"Perhaps we can forget them, too--one by one. I guess you haven't
understood me. I dare say I haven't understood you, either, though I
think I could if you'd give me a chance. But all I want to say is this,
that I'm--off--"

Ashley turned quickly. "Off? Where?"

"Where we're not likely to meet--for some little time--again."

"Oh, but I say! You can't--"

"Can't what, Colonel?"

"Can't drop--drop out of the running--damn it all, man! you can't--you
can't--let it be a walk-over for _me_--after all that's--"

"That's where you've made your mistake, Colonel, I guess. You thought
there was--was a--a race, so to speak--and that I was in it. Well, I
wasn't?"

"But what the deuce--?"

"I not only wasn't in it--but there was no race. There never was. It was
a walk-over for--for some one--from the start. Now I guess I'll say good
night."

He turned away abruptly, but, having taken a few steps, came back again.

"Look here! Let's have a cigarette."

Ashley fumbled for his case, opened it, and held it up. "I say, take two
or three."

As Ashley lifted the one he was smoking to serve as a light Davenant
noticed that the hand trembled, and steadied it in the grasp of his own.

"Thanks; and good night again," he said, briefly, as he strode finally
away into the darkness.




XX


It was not till the motor had actually got out of Havre and was well
along the dusty white road to the château that Davenant began to have
misgivings. Up to that point the landmarks--and and the sea-marks--had
been familiar. On board the _Louisiana_, in London, in Paris, even in
Havre, he had felt himself on his accustomed beat. On steamers or trains
and in hotels he had that kind of confidence in himself which, failing
him somewhat whenever he entered the precincts of domestic life, was
sure to desert him altogether now, as he approached the strange and
imposing.

"Madame est à la campagne."

A black-eyed old woman had told him so on the previous day. For the
instant he was relieved, since it put off the moment of confronting the
great lady a little longer.

He had, in fact, rung the bell at the frowning portal in the rue de
l'Université with some trepidation. Suggestions of grandeur and mystery
beyond anything he was prepared to meet lay within these seemingly
fortified walls. At the same time it gave glory to the glamour in which
the image of Olivia Guion always appeared to him to think she had
passed and repassed these solemn gates at will, and that the stately
Louis Quinze _hôtel_, of which the concierge allowed him a glimpse
across the courtyard, had, on and off, been her home for years. It was
one more detail that removed her beyond his sphere and made her
inaccessible to his yearnings.

From the obliging post-office clerk at the bank on which he drew--a
gentleman posted in the movements of all distinguished Americans on the
continent of Europe--he learned that "la campagne" for the Marquise de
Melcourt meant the château of Melcourt-le-Danois in the neighborhood of
Harfleur. He was informed, moreover, that by taking the two-o'clock
train to Havre he could sleep that night at the Hôtel Frascati, and
motor out to Melcourt easily within an hour in the morning. It began
then to occur to him that what had presented itself at first as a
prosaic journey from Boston to Paris and back was becoming an adventure,
with a background of castles and noble dames.

Nevertheless, he took heart for the run to Havre, and except for feeling
at twilight the wistfulness that comes out of the Norman landscape--the
melancholy of things forgotten but not gone, dead but still brooding
wraith-like over the valley of the Seine, haunting the hoary churches,
and the turreted châteaux, and the windings of the river, and the long
lines of poplar, and the villages and forests and orchards and
corn-fields--except for this, his spirits were good. If now and then he
was appalled at what he, a shy fellow with no antecedents to recommend
him and no persuasive powers, had undertaken, he thought of Olivia
Guion. The thing he was attempting became trivial when compared with the
possible benefits to her.

That reflections too, enabled him to come victoriously out of three long
hours of inward wrestling--three long hours spent on the jetty which
thrust itself into the sea just outside his hotel at Havre. He supposed
he had already fought the battle with himself and won it. Its renewal on
the part of powers within his soul took him by surprise.

He had strolled out after dinner to the Chaussée des États-Unis to while
away the time before going to bed. Ships and sailors, with the lights
and sights and sounds of a busy port, had for him the fascination they
exert over most men who lead rather sedentary lives. At that time in the
evening the Chaussée des États-Unis was naturally gay with the
landsman's welcome to the sailor on shore. The cafés were crowded both
inside and out. Singing came from one and the twang of an instrument
from another, all along the quay. Soldiers mingled fraternally with
sailors, and pretty young women, mostly bareheaded and neatly dressed in
black, mingled with both. It was what a fastidious observer of life
might call "low," but Davenant's judgments had no severity of that kind.
He looked at the merry groups, composed for the most part of chance
acquaintances, here to-day and gone to-morrow, swift and light of love,
with a curious craving for fellowship. From the gatherings of friends he
felt himself invariably the one shut out.

It was this sense of exclusion that finally sent him away from the
cheerful quay to wander down the jetty which marks the line where the
Harbor of Grace, with its intricate series of basins and docks, becomes
the sea. It was a mild night, though the waves beat noisily enough
against the bastions of the pier. At intervals he was swept by a scud of
spray. All sorts of acrid odors were in the wind--smells of tar and salt
and hemp and smoke and oil--the perfumes of sea-hazard and romance.

Pulling his cap over his brows and the collar of his ulster about his
ears, he sat down on the stone coping. His shoulders were hunched; his
hands hung between his knees. He did not care to smoke. For a few
minutes he was sufficiently occupied in tracing the lines and the
groupings of lights. He had been in Havre more than once before, and
knew the quai de Londres from the quai de New York, and both from the
quai du Chili. Across the mouth of the Seine he could distinguish the
misty radiance which must be Trouville from that which must be Honfleur.
Directly under his eyes in the Avant Port the dim hulls of steamers and
war-ships, fishing-boats and tugs, lay like monsters asleep.

There was no reason why all this should make him feel outside
[Transcriber's Note: Original reads 'outide'] the warm glow and life of
things; but it did. It did worse in that it inspired a longing for what
he knew positively to be unattainable. It stirred a new impulse to fight
for what he had definitely given up. It raised again questions he thought
he had answered and revived hopes he had never had to quench, since from
the beginning they were vain.

_Were_ they vain? In taking this form the query became more
insidious--more difficult to debate and settle once for all. To every
argument there was a perpetually recurring, "Yes, but--" with the memory
of the instants when her hand rested in his longer than there was any
need for, of certain looks and lights in her eyes, of certain tones and
half-tones in her voice. Other men would have made these things a
beginning, whereas he had taken them as the end. He had taken them as
the end by a foregone conclusion. They had meant so much to him that he
couldn't conceive of asking more, when perhaps they were nothing but the
first fruits.

The wind increased in violence; the spray was salt on his mustache, and
clung to the nap of his clothing. The radiance that marked Trouville and
Honfleur grew dim almost to extinction. Along the quay the cafés began
to diminish the number of their lights. The cheerful groups broke up,
strolling home to the mansard or to the fo'castle, with bursts of
drunken or drowsy song. Davenant continued to sit crouched, huddled,
bowed. He ceased to argue, or to follow the conflict between
self-interest and duty, or to put up a fight of any kind. He was content
to sit still and suffer. In its own way suffering was a relief. It was
the first time he had given it a chance since he had brought himself to
facing squarely the fact of his useless, pointless love. He had always
dodged it by finding something to be done, or choked it down by sheer
force of will. Now he let it rush in on him, all through him, all over
him, flooding his mind and spirit, making his heart swell and his blood
surge and his nerves ache and his limbs throb and quiver. If he could
have formed a thought it would have been that of the Hebrew Psalmist
when he felt himself poured out like water. He had neither shame for his
manhood nor alarm for his pride till he heard himself panting, panting
raucously, with a sound that was neither a moan nor a sob, but which
racked him convulsively, while there was a hot smarting in his eyes.

But in the end he found relief and worked his way out to a sort of
victory. That is to say, he came back to see, as he had seen all along,
that there was one clear duty to be done. If he loved Olivia Guion with
a love that was worthy to win, it must also be with a love that could
lose courageously. This was no new discovery. It was only a fact which
loneliness and the craving to be something to her, as she was everything
to him, had caused him for the moment to lose sight of. But he came back
to it with conviction. It was conviction that gave him confidence, that
calmed him, enabling him, as a clock somewhere struck eleven, to get up,
shake the sea-spray from his person, and return to his hotel.

It was while he was going to bed that Rodney Temple's words came back to
him, as they did from time to time: "Some call it God."

"I wonder if it is--God," he questioned.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the
morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely
and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from
railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His
assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an
obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of
this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they
sped had once--and not so many years ago--been the border of the bed of
the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and
edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river,
and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of
a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville,
having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these
interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the
noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the
craft on its bosom--steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the
farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as _The Flying Dutchman_
in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen;
fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages,
clambering over cliffs to a casino, a _plage_, and a Hôtel des Bains, or
nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque
wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had
once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was
blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a
still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties
only when the chauffeur turned and said:

"Voilà, monsieur--voilà le château de madame la marquise."

If it was possible for Davenant's heart to leap and sink in the same
instant, it did it then. It leaped at the sight of this white and rose
castle, with its towers and donjon and keep; it sank at the thought that
he, poor old unpretentious Peter Davenant, with no social or personal
passports of any kind, must force his way over drawbridge and beneath
portcullis--or whatever else might be the method of entering a feudal
pile--into the presence of the châtelaine whose abode here must be that
of some legendary princess, and bend her to his will. Stray memories
came to him of Siegfrieds and Prince Charmings, with a natural gift for
this sort of thing, but only to make his own appearance in the rôle the
more absurd.

Melcourt-le-Danois had that characteristic which goes with all fine and
fitting architecture of springing naturally out of the soil. It seemed
as if it must always have been there. It was as difficult to imagine the
plateau on which it stood without it as to see Mont Saint Michel merely
as a rocky islet. The plateau crowned a white bluff running out like the
prow of a Viking ship into a bend of the Seine, commanding the river in
both directions. It was clear at a glance that when Roger the Dane laid
here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of
Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky
cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been
carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had
driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois
which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the
first place a strip of gardens, and orchards of small fruit, through
which the, road from Harfleur to the village of Melcourt, half a mile
farther up the Seine, ran like a bit of white braid.

Viewed from the summit of the cliff on which Davenant's motor had
stopped, the château was composed of two ancient towers guarding the
long, and relatively low, relatively modern, brick mansion of the epoch
of Louis Treize. The brick, once red, had toned down now to a soft old
rose; the towers, once white, were splashed above the line to which the
ivy climbed with rose and orange. Over the tip of the bluff and down its
side of southern exposure, toward the village of Melcourt, ran a park of
oak and chestnut, in all the October hues of yellow and olive-brown.

But ten minutes later, when the motor had made a detour round cliffs and
little inlets and arrived at the main entrance to the château, Davenant
found the aspect of things less intimidating. Through a high
wrought-iron grille, surmounted by the head of an armorial beast, he had
the view of a Lenôtre garden, all scrolls and arabesques. The towers,
which at a distance had seemed part of a continuous whole, now detached
themselves. The actual residence was no more imposing than any
good-sized house in America. Davenant understood the chauffeur to say
that "Madame la marquise l'avait modernisé jusqu'au bout des ongles."

Having summoned up courage to ring the bell, he found it answered by a
middle-aged woman with a face worn by time and weather to the polished
grooves and creases to which water wears a rock.

"On ne visite pas le château."

She made the statement with the stony, impersonal air of one who has to
say the same thing a good many times a year. Davenant pressed close to
the grille, murmuring something of which she caught the word "Madame."

"Madame la marquise n'est pas visible."

The quick Norman eye had, however, noticed the movement of Davenant's
hand, detecting there something more than a card. In speaking she edged
nearer the grille. Thrusting his fingers between the curves of the iron
arabesques, he said, in his best French: "_Prenez_."

Measuring time by the pounding of his heart rather than the ticking of
his watch, it seemed to him he had a long time to wait before the woman
reappeared, handing him back his card through the openwork of the
grille, saying briefly: "Madame la marquise ne reçoit pas." Perhaps it
was the crestfallen look in the blond giant's face that tempted her to
add: "Je le regrette, monsieur."

In the compassionate tone he read a hint that all was not lost.
Scribbling under his name the words: "Boston, Mass. Very urgent," he
once more passed the card through the grille, accompanied by the manual
act that had won the woman's sympathy in the first place.

"_Allez_, please," he said, earnestly, "and--_vite_."

He found his penciled words effective, for presently the woman came
back. "Venez, monsieur," she said, as she unlocked the grille with a
large key carried beneath her apron. Her stony official manner had
returned.

As he drew near the house a young man sketching or writing under a
yew-tree looked up curiously. A few steps farther on a pretty girl, in a
Leghorn hat, clipping roses into a basket, glanced at him with shy,
startled eyes. In the hall, where he was left standing, a young officer
in sky-blue tunic and red breeches, who had been strumming at a piano in
an adjoining room, strolled to the door and stared at him. A thin,
black-eyed, sharp-visaged, middle-aged lady, dressed in black and
wearing a knitted shawl--perhaps the mother of the three young people he
had just seen--came half-way down the strip of red carpet on the stairs,
inspected him, and went up again. It was all more disconcerting than he
had expected.

The great hall, of which the chief beauty was in the magnificent sweep
of the monumental stairway, with its elaborate wrought-iron balustrade,
struck him as a forbidding entry to a home. A man-servant came at last
to deliver him from the soft, wondering eyes of the young officer, and
lead him into a room which he had already recognized as a library
through the half-open door.

Here he had just time to get a blurred impression of portraits, busts,
Bull surfaces, and rich or ancient bindings--with views through the long
windows of the traffic on the Seine--when a little old lady appeared in
a doorway at the farther end of the room. He knew she was a little old
lady from all sorts of indefinable evidence, in spite of her own efforts
to be young. He knew it in spite of fluffy golden hair and a filmy,
youthful morning robe that displayed the daintiness of her figure as
well as the expensiveness of her taste.

She tripped rapidly down the long room, with quick little steps and a
quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves
blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the
Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which
poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The
face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a
chance. Looking at it as she came nearer, Davenant was reminded of
things he had read of those Mongolian tribes who are said to put on
masks to hide their fear and go resolutely forth to battle. Having
always considered this a lofty form of courage, he was inconsistent in
finding its reflection here--the fear of time beneath these painted
cheeks and fluffy locks, and the fight against it carried on by the
Marquise's whole brave bearing--rather pitifully comic.

Madame herself had no such feeling. She wore her mask with absolute
nonchalance, beginning to speak while still some yards away.

"Eh, bien, monsieur?"

Davenant doubled himself up into a deep bow, but before he had time to
stammer out some apologetic self-introduction, she continued:

"You've come from Davis and Stern, I suppose, on business. I always tell
them not to send me people, but to cable. Why didn't they cable? They
know I don't like Americans coming here. I'm pestered to death with
them--that is, I used to be--and I should be still, if I didn't put 'em
down."

The voice was high and chattering, with a tendency to crack. It had the
American quality with a French intonation. In speaking, the Marquise
made little nervous dashes, now to the right, now to the left, as though
endeavoring to get by some one who blocked her way.

"I haven't come on business, my--my lady."

He used this term of respect partly from a frightened desire to
propitiate a great personage and partly because he couldn't think of any
other.

"Then what _have_ you come on? If it's to see the château you may as
well go away. It's never shown. Those are positive orders. I make no
exceptions. They must have told you so at the gate. But you Americans
will dare anything. Mon Dieu, quel tas de barbares!"

The gesture of her hands in uttering the exclamation was altogether
French, but she betrayed her oneness with the people she reviled by
saying: "Quel tah de bah-bah!"

"I haven't come to see the château either, my lady--"

"You can call me madame," she interrupted, not without a kindlier
inflection on the hint.

He began again. "I haven't come to see the château, either--madame. I've
come to see _you_."

She made one of her little plunges. "Oh, indeed! _Have_ you? I thought
you'd learned better than that--over there. You used to come in
ship-loads, but--"

He began to feel more sure of himself. "When I say I came to see you,
madame, I mean, I came to--to tell you something."

"Then, so long as it's not on business, I don't want to hear it. I
suppose you're one of Walter Davenant's boys? I don't consider him any
relation to me at all. It's too distant. If I acknowledged all the
cousins forced on me from over there I might as well include Abraham and
Adam. Are you the first or the second wife's son?"

He explained his connection with the Davenant name. "But that isn't what
I came to talk about, madame--not about myself. I wanted to tell you
of--of your nephew--Mr. Henry Guion."

She turned with a movement like that of a fleeing nymph, her hand
stretched behind her. "Don't. I don't want to hear about him. Nor about
my niece. They're strangers to me. I don't know them."

"You'd like to know them now, madame--because they're in great trouble."

She took refuge behind a big English arm-chair, leaning on the back.

"I dare say. It's what they were likely to come to. I told my niece so,
the last time she allowed me the privilege of her conversation. But I
told her, too, that in the day of her calamity she wasn't to look to
me."

"She isn't looking to you, madame. _I_ am. I'm looking to you because I
imagine you can help her. There's no one else--"

"And has she sent you as her messenger? Why can't she come herself, if
it's so bad as all that--or write? I thought she was married--to some
Englishman."

"They're not married yet, madame; and unless you help her I don't see
how they're going to be--the way things stand."

"Unless I help her! My good fellow, you don't know what you're saying.
Do you know that she refused--refused violently--to help _me_?"

He shook his head, his blue eyes betraying some incredulity.

"Well, then, I'll tell you. It'll show you. You'll be able to go away
again with a clear conscience, knowing you've done your best and failed.
Sit down."

As she showed no intention of taking a seat herself, he remained
standing.

"She refused the Duc de Berteuil." She made the statement with head
erect and hands flung apart. "I suppose you have no idea of what that
meant to me?"

"I'm afraid I haven't."

"Of course you haven't. I don't know an American who _would_ have.
You're so engrossed in your own small concerns. None of you have any
conception of the things that really matter--the higher things. Well,
then, let me tell you. The Duc de Berteuil is--or rather _was_--the
greatest parti in France. He isn't any more, because they've married him
to a rich girl from South America or one of those places--brown as a
berry--with a bust--" She rounded her arms to give an idea of the bust.
"Mais, n'importe. My niece refused him. That meant--I've never confessed
it to any one before--I've been too proud--but I want you to
understand--it meant my defeat--my final defeat. I hadn't the courage to
begin again. C'était le désastre. C'était Sedan."

"Oh, madame!"

It seemed to him that her mouth worked with an odd piteousness; and
before going on she put up a crooked little jeweled hand and dashed away
a tear.

"It would have been everything to me. It would have put me where I
belong, in the place I've been trying to reach all these years. The life
of an American woman in Europe, monsieur, can be very cruel. We've
nothing to back us up, and everything to fight against in front. It's
all push, and little headway. They don't want us. That's the plain
English of it. They can't imagine why we leave our own country and come
over here. They're so narrow. They're selfish, too. Everything they've
got they want to keep for themselves. They marry us--the Lord only knows
why!--and nine times out of ten all we get for it is the knowledge that
we've been bamboozled out of our own _dots_. There was René de
Lonchartres who married that goose Annie Armstrong. They ridiculed her
when she came over here, and at the same time clapped him on the back
for having got her. That's as true as you live. It's their way. They
would have ridiculed me, too, if I hadn't been determined years ago to
beat them on their own ground. I could have done it, too, if--"

"If it had been worth while," he ventured.

"You know nothing about it. I could have done it if my niece had put out
just one little finger--when I'd got everything ready for her to do it.
Yes, I'd got everything ready--and yet she refused him. She refused him
after I'd seen them all--his mother, his sisters, his two uncles--one of
them in waiting on the Duc d'Orléans--Philippe V., as we call him--all
of them the purest old noblesse d'epée in Normandy."

Her agitation expressed itself again in little dartings to and fro. "I
went begging to them, as you might say. I took all their snubs--and oh!
so fine some of them were!--more delicate than the point of a needle! I
took them because I could see just how I should pay them back. I needn't
explain to you how that would be, because you couldn't understand. It
would be out of the question for an American."

"I don't think we _are_ good at returning snubs, madame. That's a fact."

"You're not good at anything but making money; and you make that
blatantly, as if you were the first people in the world to do it. Why,
France and England could buy and sell you, and most of you don't know
it. Mais, n'importe. I went begging to them, as I've told you. At first
they wouldn't hear of her at any price--didn't want an American. That
was bluff, to get a bigger _dot_. I had counted on it in advance. I knew
well enough that they'd take a Hottentot if there was money enough. For
the matter of that, Hottentot and American are much the same to them.
But I made it bluff for bluff. Oh, I'm sharp. I manage all my own
affairs in America--with advice. I've speculated a little in your
markets quite successfully. I know how I stand to within a few thousand
dollars of your money. I offered half a million of francs. They laughed
at it. I knew they would, but it's as much as they'd get with a French
girl. I went to a million--to a million and a half--to two millions. At
two millions--that would be--let me see--five into twenty makes
four--about four hundred thousand dollars of your money--they gave in.
Yes, they gave in. I expected them to hold out for it, and they did. But
at that figure they made all the concessions and gave in."

"And did he give in?" Davenant asked, with naïve curiosity.

"Oh, I'd made sure of him beforehand. He and I understood each other
perfectly. He would have let it go at a million and a half. He was next
door to being in love with her besides. All he wanted was to be well
established, poor boy! But I meant to go up to two millions, anyhow. I
could afford it."

"Four hundred thousand dollars," Davenant said, with an idea that he
might convey a hint to her, "would be practically the sum--"

"I could afford it," she went on, "because of those ridiculous
copper-mines--the Hamlet and Tecla. I wasn't rich before that. My _dot_
was small. No Guion I ever heard of was able to save money. My father
was no exception."

"You are in the Hamlet and Tecla!" Davenant's blue eyes were wide open.
He was on his own ground. The history of the Hamlet and Tecla Mines had
been in his own lifetime a fairy-tale come true.

Madame de Melcourt nodded proudly. "My father had bought nearly two
thousand shares when they were down to next to nothing. They came to me
when he died. It was mere waste paper for years and years. Then all of a
sudden--pouff!--they began to go up and up--and I sold them when they
were near a thousand. I could have afforded the two millions of
francs--and I promised to settle Melcourt-le-Danois on them into the
bargain, when I--if I ever should--But my niece wouldn't take
him--simply--would--not. Ah," she cried, in a strangled voice, "c'était
trop fort!"

"But did she know you were--what shall I say?--negotiating?"

"She was in that stupid England. It wasn't a thing I could write to her
about. I meant it as a surprise. When all was settled I sent for
her--and told her. Oh, monsieur, vous n'avez pas d'idée! Queue scène!
Queue scène! J'ai failli en mourir." She wrung her clasped hands at the
recollection.

"That girl has an anger like a storm. Avec tous ses airs de reine et de
sainte--she was terrible. Never shall I forget it--jamais! jam-ais! au
grand jamais! Et puis," she added, with a fatalistic toss of her hands,
"c'était fini. It was all over. Since then--nothing!"

She made a little dash as if to leave him, returning to utter what
seemed like an afterthought. "It would have made her. It would have made
_me_. We could have dictated to the Faubourg. We could have humiliated
them--like that." She stamped her foot. "It would have been a great
alliance--what I've been so much in need of. The Melcourt--well, they're
all very well--old noblesse de la Normandie, and all that--but
poor!--mais pauvres!--and as provincial as a curé de campagne. When I
married my poor husband--but we won't go into that--I've been a widow
since I was so high--ever since 1870--with my own way to make. If my
niece hadn't deserted me I could have made it. Now all that is
past--fini-ni-ni! The clan Berteuil has set the Faubourg against me.
They've the power, too. It's all so intricate, so silent, such wheels
within wheels--but it's done. They've never wanted me. They don't want
any of us--not for ourselves. It's the sou!--the sou!--the everlasting
sou! Noble or peasant--it makes no difference. But if my niece hadn't
abandoned me--"

"Why shouldn't you come home, madame?" Davenant suggested, touched by so
much that was tragic. "You wouldn't find any one after the sou there."

"They're all about me," she whispered--"the Melcourt. They're all over
the house. They come and settle on me, and I can't shake them off. They
suffocate me--waiting for the moment when--But I've made my will, and
some'll be disappointed. Oh, I shall leave them Melcourt-le-Danois. It's
mine. I bought it with my own money, after my husband's death, and
restored it when the Hamlet and Tecla paid so well. It shall not go out
of their family--for my husband's sake. But," she added, fiercely,
"neither shall the money go out of mine. They shall know I have a
family. It's the only way by which I can force the knowledge on them.
They think I sprang out of the earth like a mushroom. You may tell my
niece as much as that--and let her get all the comfort from it she can.
That's all I have to say, monsieur. Good morning."

The dash she made from him seeming no more final than those which had
preceded it, he went on speaking.

"I'm afraid, madame, that help is too far in the future to be of much
assistance now. Besides, I'm not sure it's what they want. We've managed
to keep Mr. Henry Guion out of prison. That danger is over. Our present
concern is for Miss Olivia Guion's happiness."

As he expected, the shock calmed her. Notwithstanding her mask, she grew
suddenly haggard, though her eyes, which--since she had never been able
to put poudre de riz or cherry paste in them--were almost as fine as
ever, instantly flashed out the signal of the Guion pride. Her fluffy
head went up, and her little figure stiffened as she entrenched herself
again behind the arm-chair. Her only hint of flinching came from a
slackening in the flow of speech and a higher, thinner quality in the
voice.

"Has my nephew, Henry Guion, been doing things--that--that would send
him--to prison?"

In spite of herself the final words came out with a gasp.

"It's a long story, madame--or, at least, a complicated one. I could
explain it, if you'd give me the time."

"Sit down."

They took seats at last. Owing to the old lady's possession of what she
herself called a business mind he found the tale easy in the telling.
Her wits being quick and her questions pertinent, she was soon in
command of the facts. She was soon, too, in command of herself. The
first shock having passed, she was able to go into complete explanations
with courage.

"So that," he concluded, "now that Mr. Guion is safe, if Miss Guion
could only marry--the man--the man she cares for--everything would be
put as nearly right as we can make it."

"And at present they are at a deadlock. She won't marry him if he has to
sell his property, and so forth; and he can't marry her, and live in
debt to you. Is that it?"

"That's it, madame, exactly. You've put it in a nutshell."

She looked at him hardly. "And what has it all got to do with me?"

He looked at her steadily in his turn. "I thought perhaps you wouldn't
care to live in debt to me, either."

She was startled. "Who? I? En voilà une idée!"

"I thought," he went on, "that possibly the Guion sense of family
honor--"

"Fiddle-faddle! There's no sense of family honor among Americans. There
can't be. You can only have family honor where, as with us, the family
is the unit; whereas, with you, the unit is the individual. The American
individual may have a sense of honor; but the American family is only a
disintegrated mush. What you really thought was that you might get your
money back."

"If you like, madame. That's another way of putting it. If the family
paid me, Miss Guion would feel quite differently--and so would Colonel
Ashley."

"When you say the family," she sniffed, "you mean me."

"In the sense that I naturally think first of its most distinguished
member. And, of course, the greater the distinction the greater must
be--shall I call it the indignity?--of living under an obligation--"

"Am I to understand that you put up this money--that's your American
term, isn't it?--that you put up this money in the expectation that I
would pay you back?"

"Not exactly. I put up the money, in the first place, to save the credit
of the Guion name, and with the intention, if you didn't pay me back, to
do without it."

"And you risked being considered over-officious."

"There wasn't much risk about that," he smiled. "They did think me
so--and do."

"And you got every one into a fix."

"Into a fix, but out of prison."

"Hm!"

She grew restless, uncomfortable, fidgeting with her rings and
bracelets.

"And pray, what sort of a person is this Englishman to whom my niece has
got herself engaged?"

"One of their very finest," he said, promptly. "As a soldier, so they
say, he'll catch up one day with men like Roberts and Kitchener; and as
for his private character--well, you can judge of it from the fact that
he wants to strip himself of all he has so that the Guion name shall owe
nothing to any one outside--"

"Then he's a fool."

"From that point of view--yes. There _are_ fools of that sort, madame.
But there's something more to him."

He found himself reciting glibly Ashley's claims as a suitor in the way
of family, position, and fortune.

"So that it would be what some people might call a good match."

"The best sort of match. It's the kind of thing she's made for--that
she'd be happy in--regiments, and uniforms, and glory, and presenting
prizes, and all that."

"Hm. I shall have nothing to do with it." She rose with dignity. "If my
niece had only held out a little finger--"

"It was a case, madame," he argued, rising, too--"it was a case in which
she couldn't hold out a little finger without offering her whole hand."

"You know nothing about it. I'm wrong to discuss it with you at all. I'm
sure I don't know why I do, except that--"

"Except that I'm an American," he suggested--"one of your own."

"One of my own! Quelle idée! Do you like him--this Englishman?"

He hedged. "Miss Guion likes him."

"But you don't."

"I haven't said so. I might like him well enough if--"

"If you got your money back."

He smiled and nodded.

"Is she in love with him?"

"Oh--deep!"

"How do _you_ know? Has she told you so?"

"Y-es; I think I may say--she has."

"Did you ask her?"

He colored. "I had to--about something."

"You weren't proposing to her yourself, were you?"

He tried to take this humorously. "Oh no, madame--"

"You can't be in love with her, or you wouldn't be trying so hard to
marry her to some one else--not unless you're a bigger fool than you
look."

"I hope I'm not that," he laughed.

"Well, I shall have nothing to do with it--nothing. Between my niece and
me--tout est fini." She darted from him, swerving again like a bird on
the wing. "I don't know you. You come here with what may be no more than
a cock-and-bull story, to get inside the château."

"I shouldn't expect you to do anything, madame, without verifying all
I've told you. For the matter of that, it'll be easy enough. You've only
to write to your men of business, or--which would be better still--take
a trip to America for yourself."

She threw out her arms with a tragic gesture. "My good man, I haven't
been in America for forty years. I nearly died of it then. What it must
be like now--"

"It wouldn't be so fine as this, madame, nor so picturesque. But it
would be full of people who'd be fond of you, not for the sou--but for
yourself."

She did her best to be offended. "You're taking liberties, monsieur.
C'est bien américan, céla."

"Excuse me, madame," he said, humbly. "I only mean that they _are_ fond
of you--at least, I I know Miss Guion is. Two nights before I sailed I
heard her almost crying for you--yes, almost crying. That's why I came.
I thought I'd come and tell you. I should think it might mean something
to you--over here so long--all alone--to have some one like that--such
a--such a--such a wonderful young lady wanting you--in her trouble--"

"And such a wonderful young man wanting his money back. Oh, I'm not
blind, monsieur. I see a great deal more than you think. I see through
and through you. You fancy you're throwing dust in my eyes, and you
haven't thrown a grain. Pouff! Oh, la, la! Mais, c'est fini. As for my
niece--le bon Dieu l' a bien punie. For me to step in now would be to
interfere with the chastisement of Providence. Le bon Dieu is always
right. I'll say that for Him. Good morning." She touched a bell. "The
man will show you to the door. If you like to stroll about the
grounds--now that you've got in--well, you can."

With sleeves blowing she sped down the room as if on pinions. The
man-servant waited respectfully. Davenant stood his ground, hoping for
some sign of her relenting. It was almost over her shoulder that she
called back:

"Where are you staying?"

He told her.

"Stupid place. You'll find the Chariot d'Or at Melcourt a great deal
nicer. Simple, but clean. An old chef of mine keeps it. Tell him I sent
you. And ask for his poularde au riz."




XXI


"What do you think of him?"

Ashley's tone indicated some uncertainty as to what he thought himself.
Indeed, uncertainty was indicated elsewhere than in his tone. It seemed
to hang about him, to look from his eyes, to take form in his person.
Perhaps this was the one change wrought in him by a month's residence in
America. When he arrived everything had bespoken him a man aggressively
positive with the habit of being sure. His very attitude, now, as he sat
in Rodney Temple's office in the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts, his hands
thrust into his pockets, his legs stretched apart, his hat on the back
of his head, suggested one who feels the foundations of the earth to
have shifted.

Rodney Temple, making his arrangements for leaving for the day, met one
question with another. "What do _you?_"

"You know him," Ashley urged, "and I don't."

"I thought you did. I thought you'd read him right off--as a
cow-puncher."

"He looks like one, by Jove! and he speaks like one, too. You wouldn't
call him a gentleman? What?"

"If you mean by a gentleman one who's always been able to take the best
in the world for granted, perhaps he isn't. But that isn't our
test--over here."

"Then, what is?"

"I'm not sure that I could tell you so that you'd understand--at any
rate, not unless you start out with the fact that the English gentleman
and the American differ not only in species, but in genus. I'd go so far
as to say that they've got to be recognized by different sets of
faculties. You get at your man by the eye and the ear; we have to use a
subtler apparatus. If we didn't we should let a good many go uncounted.
Some of our finest are even more uncouth with their consonants than good
friend Davenant. They'd drop right out of your list, but they take a
high place in ours. To try to discern one by the methods created for the
other is like what George Eliot says of putting on spectacles to detect
odors. Ignorance of this basic social fact on both sides has given rise
to much international misjudgment. See?"

"Can't say that I do."

"No, you wouldn't. But until you do you won't understand a big simple
type--"

"I don't care a hang about his big simple type. What I want to know is
how to take him. Is he a confounded sentimentalist?--or is he still
putting up a bluff?"

"What difference does it make to you?"

"If he's putting up a bluff, he's waiting out there at Michigan for me
to call it. If he's working the sentimental racket, then I've got to be
the beneficiary of his beastly good-will."

"If he's putting up a bluff, you can fix him by not calling it at all;
and as for his beastly good-will, well, he's a beneficiary of it, too."

"How so?"

"Because beastly good-will is a thing that cuts both ways. He'll get as
much out of it as you."

"That's all very fine--"

"It's very fine, indeed, for him. We've an old saying in these parts: By
the Street called Straight we come to the House called Beautiful. It's
one of those fanciful saws of which the only justification is that it
works. Any one can test the truth of it by taking the highway. Well,
friend Davenant is taking it. He'll reach the House called Beautiful as
straight as a die. Don't you fret about that. You'll owe him nothing in
the long run, because he'll get all the reward he's entitled to. When's
the wedding? Fixed the date yet?"

"Not going to fix one," Ashley explained, moodily. "One of these days,
when everything is settled at Tory Hill and the sale is over, we shall
walk off to the church and get married. That seems to be the best way,
as matters stand."

"It's a very sensible way at all times. And I hear you're carrying Henry
off with you to England."

Ashley shrugged his shoulders. "Going the whole hog. What? Had to make
the offer. Olivia couldn't leave him behind. Anything that will make her
happy--"

"Will make you happy."

"That's about the size of it."

Having locked the last drawer and put out the desk light, Temple led his
guest down the long gallery and across the Yard to the house on
Charlesbank. Here Ashley pursued kindred themes in the company of Mrs.
Fane, finding himself alone with her at tea. He was often alone with her
at tea, her father having no taste for this form of refreshment, while
her mother found reasons for being absent.

"Queer old cove, your governor," Ashley observed, stretching himself
comfortably before the fire. The blaze of logs alone lit up the room.

"Is that why you seem to have taken a fancy to him?"

"I like to hear him gassing. Little bit like the Bible, don't you know."

"He's very fond of the Bible."

"Seems to think a lot of that chap--your governor."

A nod supposed to indicate the direction of the State of Michigan
enabled her to follow his line of thought.

"He does. There's something rather colossal about the way he's dropped
out--"

"A jolly sight too colossal. Makes him more important than if he'd
stayed on the spot and fought the thing to a finish."

"Fought what thing to a finish?"

He was sorry to have used the expression. "Oh, there's still a jolly lot
to settle up, you know."

"But I thought everything was arranged--that you'd accepted the
situation."

He stretched himself more comfortably before the fire. "We'd a row," he
said, suddenly.

"A row? What kind of a row?"

"A street row--just like two hooligans. He struck me."

"Rupert!" She half sprang up. "He--"

Ashley swung round in his chair. He was smiling.

"Oh, I _beg_ your pardon," she cried, in confusion. "I can't think what
made me call you that. I never _do_--never. It was the surprise--and the
shock--"

"That's all right," he assured her. "I often call you Drusilla when I'm
talking to Olivia. I don't see why we shouldn't--we've always been such
pals--and we're going to be a kind of cousins--"

"Tell me about Peter."

"Oh, there's nothing much that stands telling. We were two idiots--two
silly asses. I insulted him--and he struck out. I called him a cad--I
believe I called him a damned cad."

"To his _face_?"

"To his _nose_."

"Oh, you shouldn't have done that."

"And he got mad, by Jove! Oh, it didn't last. We pulled off in a second
or two. We saw we were two idiots--two kids. It wasn't worth getting on
one's high horse about--or attempting to follow it up--it was too
beastly silly for heroics--except that--that he--"

"Except that he--what?"

"Except that he--got the better of me. He has the better of me still.
And I can't allow that, by Jove! Do you see?"

"I don't see very clearly. In what way did he get the better of you?"

"In the whole thing--the way he carried it off--the whole silly
business."

"Then I don't see what's to be done about it _now_."

"Something's got to be done, by Jove! I can't let it go at that."

"Well, what do you propose?"

"I don't propose anything. But I can't go through life letting that
fellow stay on top. Why, considering everything--all he's done for
Olivia and her father--and now this other thing--and his beastly
magnanimity besides--he's frightfully on top. It won't do, you know. But
I say, you'll not tell Olivia, will you? She'd hate it--about the row, I
mean. I don't mind your knowing. You're always such a good pal to me--"

It was impossible to go on, because Mrs. Temple bustled in from the task
of helping Olivia with the packing and sacking at Tory Hill. Having
greeted Ashley with the unceremoniousness permissible with one who was
becoming an intimate figure at the fireside, she settled to her tea.

"Oh, so sad!" she reflected, her little pursed-up mouth twitching
nervously. "The dear old house all dismantled! Everything to go! I've
asked Henry to come and stay here. It's too uncomfortable for him, with
all the moving and packing going on around him. It'll be easier for dear
Olivia, too. So hard for her to take care of him, with all the other
things she has on her hands. There's Peter's room. Henry may as well
have it. I don't suppose we shall see anything more of Peter for ages to
come. But I do wish he'd write. Don't you, Colonel Ashley? I've written
to him three times now--and not a line from him! I suppose they must be
able to get letters out there, at Stoughton, Michigan. It can't be so
far beyond civilization as all that. And Olivia would like it. She's
worried about him--about his not writing--and everything. Don't you
think, Colonel Ashley?"

Ashley looked blank. "I haven't noticed it--"

"Oh, I have. A woman's eye sees those little things, don't you think?
Men have so much on their hands--the great things of the world--but the
little things, they often count, don't you think? But I tell dear Olivia
not to worry. Everything will come right. Things do come right--very
often. I'm more pessimistic than Rodney--that I must say. But still I
think things have a way of coming right when we least expect it. I tell
dear Olivia that Peter will send a line just when we're not looking for
it. It's the watched pot that never boils, you know, and so I tell her
to stop watching for the postman. That's fatal to getting a
letter--watching for the postman. How snug you two look here together!
Well, I'll run up and take off my things. No; no more tea, dear. I won't
say good-by, Colonel Ashley, because you'll be here when I come down."

Mrs. Temple was a good woman who would have been astonished to hear
herself accused of falsehood but, as a matter of fact, her account of
the conversation with Olivia bore little relation to the conversation
itself. What she had actually said was:

"Poor Peter! I suppose he doesn't write because he's trying to forget."

The challenge here being so direct, Olivia felt it her duty to take it
up. The ladies were engaged in sorting the linen in preparation for the
sale.

"Forget what?"

"Forget Drusilla, I suppose. Hasn't it struck you--how much he was in
love with her?"

Olivia held a table-cloth carefully to the light. "Is this Irish linen
or German? I know mamma did get some at Dresden--"

Mrs. Temple pointed out the characteristic of the Belfast weave and
pressed her question. "Haven't you noticed it--about Peter?"

Olivia tried to keep her voice steady as she said: "I've no doubt I
should have seen it if I hadn't been so preoccupied."

"Some people think--Rodney, for instance--that he'd lost his head about
you, dear; but we mothers have an insight--"

"Of course! There seems to be one missing from the dozen of this
pattern."

"Oh, it'll turn up. It's probably in the pile over there. I thought I'd
speak about it, dear," she went on, "because it must be a relief to you
not to have that complication. Things are so complicated already, don't
you think? But if you haven't Peter on your mind, why, that's one thing
the less to worry about. If you thought he was in love with you,
dear--in your situation--going to be married to some one else--But you
needn't be afraid of that at all. I never saw a young man more in love
with any one than he is with Drusilla--and I think she must have refused
him. If she hadn't he would never have shot off in that way, like a bolt
from the blue--But what's the matter, dear? You look white. You're not
ill?"

"It's the smell of lavender," Olivia gasped, weakly. "I never could
endure it. I'll just run into the air a minute--"

This was all that passed between Olivia and Mrs. Temple on the subject.
If the latter reported it with suppressions and amplifications it was
doubtless due to her knowledge of what could be omitted as well as of
what would have been said had the topic been pursued. In any case it
caused her to sigh and mumble as she went on with her task of folding
and unfolding and of examining textures and designs:

"Oh, how mixy! Such sixes and sevens! Everything the wrong way round! My
poor Drusilla!--my poor little girlie! And such a good position! Just
what she's capable of filling!--as well as Olivia--better, with all her
experience of their army. ''Tis better to have loved and lost,' dear
Tennyson says; but I don't know. Besides, she's done that already--with
poor Gerald--and now, to have to face it all a second time--my poor
little girlie!"

As for Olivia, she felt an overpowering desire to flee away. Speeding
through the house, where workmen were nailing up cases or sacking rugs,
she felt that she was fleeing--fleeing anywhere--anywhere--to hide
herself. As a matter of fact, the flight was inward, for there was
nowhere to go but to her room. Her way was down the short staircase from
the attic and along a hall; but it seemed to her that she lived through
a succession of emotional stages in the two or three minutes it took to
cover it. Her first wild cry "It isn't true! It isn't true!" was
followed by the question "Why shouldn't it be true?" to end with her
asking herself: "What difference does it make to me?"

"What difference _can_ it make to me?"

She had reached that form of the query by the time she took up her
station at the window of her room, to stare blankly at the November
landscape. She saw herself face to face now with the question which,
during the past month, ever since Davenant's sudden disappearance, she
had used all her resources to evade. That it would one day force itself
upon her she knew well enough; but she hoped, too, that before there was
time for that she would have pronounced her marriage vows, and so burned
her bridges behind her. Amid the requirements of duty, which seemed to
shift from week to week, the one thing stable was the necessity on her
part to keep her promise to the man who had stood by her so nobly. If
once it had seemed to her that Davenant's demands--whatever they might
prove to be--would override all others, it was now quite clear that
Ashley's claim on her stood first of all. He had been so loyal, so true,
so indifferent to his own interests! Besides, he loved her. It was now
quite another love from that of the romantic knight who had wooed a
gracious lady in the little house at Southsea. That tapestry-tale had
ended on the day of his arrival at Tory Hill. In its place there had
risen the tested devotion of a man for a woman in great trouble,
compelled to deal with the most sordid things in life. He had refused to
be spared any of the details she would have saved him from or to turn
away from any of the problems she was obliged to face. His very revolt
against it, that repugnance to the necessity for doing it which he was
not at all times able to conceal, made his self-command in bringing
himself to it the more worthy of her esteem. He had the defects of his
qualities and the prejudices of his class and profession; but over and
above these pardonable failings he had the marks of a hero.

And now there was this thing!

She had descried it from afar. She had had a suspicion of it before
Davenant went away. It had not created a fear; it was too strange and
improbable for that; but it had brought with it a sense of wonder. She
remembered the first time she had felt it, this sense of wonder, this
sense of something enchanted, outside life and the earth's atmosphere.
It was at that moment on the lawn when, after the unsuccessful meeting
between Ashley and Davenant, she had turned with the latter to go into
the house. That there was a protective, intimate element in her feeling
she had known on the instant; but what she hadn't known on the instant,
but was perfectly aware of now, was that her whole subconscious being,
had been crying out even then: "My own! My own!"

With the exaggeration of this thought she was able to get herself in
hand. She was able to debate so absurd a suggestion, to argue it down,
and turn it into ridicule. But she yielded again as the Voice that
talked with her urged the plea: "I didn't say you knew it consciously.
You couldn't cry 'My own! My own!' to a man whom up to that point you
had treated with disdain. But your subliminal being had begun to know
him, to recognize him as--"

To elude this fancy she set herself to recapitulating his weak points.
She could see why Ashley should thrust him aside as being "not a
gentleman." He fell short, in two or three points, of the English
standard. That he had little experience of life as it is lived, of its
balance and proportion and perspective, was clear from the way in which
he had flung himself and his money into the midst of the Guion
disasters. No man of the world could possibly have done that. The very
fact of his doing it made him lawfully a subject for some of the
epithets Ashley applied to him. Almost any one would apply them who
wanted to take him from a hostile point of view.

She forgot herself so far as to smile faintly. It was just the sort of
deficiency which she had it in her power to make up. The reflection set
her to dreaming when she wanted to be doing something else. She could
have brought him the dower of all the things he didn't know, while he
could give her.... But she caught herself again.

"What kind of a woman am I?"

She began to be afraid. She began to see in herself the type she most
detested--the woman who could deliberately marry a man and not be loyal
to him. She was on the threshold of marriage with Ashley, and she was
thinking of the marvel of life with some one else. When one of the inner
Voices denied this charge, another pressed it home by nailing the
precise incident on which her heart had been dwelling. "You were
thinking of this--of that--of the time on the stairs when, with his face
close to yours, he asked you if you loved the man you'd be going away
with--of the evening at the gate when your hand was in his and it was so
hard to take it away. He has no position to offer you. There's nothing
remarkable about him beyond a capacity for making money. He's beneath
you from every point of view except that of his mere manhood, and yet
you feel that you could let yourself slip into that--into the strength
and peace of it--"

She caught herself again--impatiently. It was no use! There was
something wilful within her, something that could be called by even a
stronger name, that worked back to the point from which she tried to
flee, whatever means she took to get away from it.

She returned to her work, persuading Cousin Cherry to go home to tea and
leave her to finish the task alone. Even while she did so one of the
inner Voices taunted her by saying: "That'll leave you all the more free
to dream of--_him_."

       *       *       *       *       *

Some days passed before she felt equal to talking about Davenant again.
This time it was to the tinkling silver, as she and Drusilla Fane sorted
spoons and forks at the sideboard in the dismantled dining-room. Olivia
was moved to speak in the desperate hope that one stab from
Drusilla--who might be in a position to deliver it--would free her from
the obsession haunting her.

There had been a long silence, sufficiently occupied, it seemed, in
laying out the different sorts and sizes of spoons in rows of a dozen,
while Mrs. Fane did the same with the forks.

"Drusilla, did Mr. Davenant ever say anything to you about me?"

She was vexed with herself for the form of her question. It was not
Davenant's feeling toward _her_, but toward Drusilla, that she wanted to
know. She was drawing the fire in the wrong place. Mrs. Fane counted her
dozen forks to the end before saying:

"Why, yes. We've spoken of you."

Having begun with a mistake, Olivia went on with it. "Did he
say--anything in particular?"

"He said a good many things, on and off."

"Some of which might have been--in particular?"

"All of them, if it comes to that."

"Why did you never tell me?"

"For one reason, because you never asked me."

"Have you any idea why I'm asking you now?"

"Not the faintest. I dare say we sha'n't see anything more of him for
years to come."

"Did you--did you--refuse him? Did you send him away?"

"Well, that's one thing I didn't have to do, thank the Lord. There was
no necessity. I was afraid at one time that mother might make him
propose to me--she's terribly subtle in that way, though you mightn't
think it--but she didn't. No; if Peter's in love with any one, it's not
with me."

Olivia braced herself to say, "And I hope it's not with me."

Drusilla went on counting.

"Did he ever say anything about that?" Olivia persisted.

Drusilla went on counting. "Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. That's all
of that set. What a lot of silver you've got! And some of it must have
been in the family for thousands of years. Yes," she added, in another
tone, "yes, he did. He said he wasn't."

Olivia laid down the ladle she was holding with infinite precaution. She
had got the stab she was looking for. It seemed for a minute as if she
was free--gloatingly free. He hadn't cared anything about her after all,
and had said so! She steadied herself by holding to the edge of the
sideboard.

Drusilla stooped to the basket of silver standing on the floor, in a
seemingly passionate desire for more forks. By the time she had
straightened herself again, Olivia was able to say: "I'm so glad of
that. You know what his kindness in helping papa has made people think,
don't you?"

But Mrs. Fane astonished her by throwing down her handful of silver with
unnecessary violence of clang and saying: "Look here, Olivia, I'd rather
not talk about it any more. I've reasons. I can't take a hand in your
affairs without being afraid that perhaps--perhaps--I--I--sha'n't play
the game."

Olivia was silent, but she had much to think of.

It was a few days later still that she found herself in Rodney Temple's
little office in the Gallery of Fine Arts. She had come ostensibly to
tell him that everything had been arranged for the sale.

"Lemon and Company think that early in December would be the best time,
as people are beginning then to spend money for Christmas. Mr. Lemon
seems to think we've got a good many things the smaller connoisseurs
will want. The servants are to go next Tuesday, so that if you and
Cousin Cherry could take papa then--I'm to stay with Lulu Sentner; and I
shall go from her house to be married--some day, when everything else is
settled. Did you know that before Mr. Davenant went away he left a small
bank account for papa?--two or three thousand dollars--so that we have
money to go on with. Rupert wants to spend a week or two in New York and
Washington, after which we shall come back here and pick up papa. He's
not very keen on coming with us, but I simply couldn't--"

He nodded at the various points in her recital, blinking at her
searchingly out of his kind old eyes.

"You look pale," he said, "and old. You look forty."

She surprised him by saying, with a sudden outburst: "Cousin Rodney, do
you think it's any harm for a woman to marry one man when she's in love
with another?" Before he had time to recover himself, she followed this
question with a second. "Do you think it's possible for a person to be
in love with two people at the same time?"

He understood now the real motive of her visit.

"I'm not a very good judge of love affairs," he said, after a minute's
reflection. "But one thing I know, and it's this--that when we do our
duty we don't have to bother with the question as to whether it's any
harm or not."

"We may do our duty, and still make people unhappy."

"No; not unless we do it in the wrong way."

"So that if I feel that to go on and keep my word is the right thing--or
rather the only thing--?"

"That settles it, dearie. The right thing _is_ the only thing--and it
makes for everybody's happiness."

"Even if it seems that it--it _couldn't_?"

"I'm only uttering platitudes, dearie, when I say that happiness is the
flower of right. No other plant can grow it; and that plant can't grow
any other flower. When you've done the thing you feel you're called to
do--the thing you couldn't refuse while still keeping your
self-respect--well, then, you needn't be afraid that any one will suffer
in the long run--and yourself least of all."

"In the long run! That means--"

"Oh, there may be a short run. I'm not denying that. But no one worth
his salt would be afraid of it. And that, dearie," he added, blinking,
"is all I know about love affairs."

There being no one in the gallery on which the office opened, she
kissed him as she thanked him and went away. She walked homeward, taking
the more retired streets through Cambridge and into Waverton, so as to
be the more free for thinking. It was a relief to her to have spoken
out. Oddly enough, she felt her heart lighter toward Davenant from the
mere fact of having told some one, or having partially told some one,
that she loved him.

When, on turning in at the gate of Tory Hill, she saw a taxicab standing
below the steps of the main entrance, she was not surprised, since
Ashley occasionally took one to run out from town. But when a little
lady in furs and an extravagant hat stepped out to pay the chauffeur
Olivia stopped to get her breath. If it hadn't been impossible she would
have said--

But the taxicab whizzed away, and the little lady tripped up the steps.

Olivia felt herself unable to move. The motor throbbed past her, and out
the gate, but she still stood incapable of going farther. It seemed long
before the pent-up emotions of the last month or two, controlled,
repressed, unacknowledged, as they had been, found utterance in one loud
cry: "Aunt Vic!"

Not till that minute had she guessed her need of a woman, a Guion, one
of her very own, a mother, on whose breast to lay her head and weep her
cares out.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first tears since the beginning of her trials came to Olivia Guion,
as, with arms clasped round her aunt and forehead pressed into the
little old lady's furs, she sat beside her on a packing-case in the
hail. She cried then as she never knew before she was capable of crying.
She cried for the joy of the present, for the trouble of the past, and
for the relief of clinging to some one to whom she had a right. Madame
de Melcourt would have cried with her, had it not been for the effect of
tears on cosmetics.

"There, there, my pet," she murmured, soothingly. "Didn't you know your
old auntie would come to you? Why didn't you cable? Didn't you know I
was right at the end of the wire. There now, cry all you want to. It'll
do you good. Your old auntie has come to take all your troubles away,
and see you happily married to your Englishman. She's brought your _dot_
in her pocket--same old _dot!_--and everything. There now, cry. There's
nothing like it."




XXII


Madame de Melcourt the chief novelty of American life, for the first few
days at least, lay in the absence of any necessity for striving. To wake
up in the morning into a society not keeping its heart hermetically shut
against her was distinctly a new thing. Not to have to plan or push or
struggle, to take snubs or repay them, to wriggle in where she was not
wanted, or to keep people out where she had wriggled in, was really
amusing. In the wide friendliness by which she found herself surrounded
she had a droll sense of having reached some scholastic paradise painted
by Puvis de Chavannes. She was even seated on a kind of throne, like
Justitia or Sapientia, with all kinds of flattering, welcoming
attentions both from old friends who could remember her when she had
lived as a girl among them and new ones who were eager to take her into
hospitable arms. It was decidedly funny. It was like getting into a
sphere where all the wishes were gratified and there were no more worlds
to conquer. It would pall in the end; in the end she would come to feel
like a gourmet in a heaven where there is no eating, or an Englishman in
some Blessed Isle where there is no sport; but for the moment it
offered that refreshing change which strengthens the spirit for taking
up the more serious things of life again. In any case, it put her into a
good-humor of which the residents at Tory Hill were the first to feel
the effect.

"Il est très bien, ton Anglais."

Olivia acknowledged this approval with a smile and a blush, as she went
about the drawing-room trying to give it something of its former air.
With the new turn of events it had become necessary to restore the house
to a condition fit for occupancy. Madame de Melcourt had moved into it
with her maid and her man, announcing her intention to remain till she
got ready to depart. Her bearing was that of Napoleon making a temporary
stay in some German or Italian palace for the purposes of national
reorganization and public weal. At the present instant she was enthroned
amid cushions in a corner of the sofa, watching Olivia dispose of such
bric-à-brac as had not been too remotely packed away.

"I always say," the old lady declared, "that when an Englishman is chic
he's very chic, and your Ashley is no exception. I don't wonder you're
in love with him."

When seated the Marquise accompanied her words with little jerkings and
perkings of her fluffy head, with wavings of the hands and rollings of
the eyes--the corelatives of her dartings and dashings while on her
feet.

It was easy for Olivia to keep her back turned, while she managed to
say: "He thinks you don't like him."

Madame shrugged her shoulders. "I like him as well as I could like any
Englishman. He's very smart. You can see at a glance he's some one. From
what I'd heard of him--his standing by you and all that--I was afraid he
might be an eccentric."

"Whom did you hear it from?"

"Oh, I heard it. There's nothing wonderful in that. A thing that's been
the talk of Boston and New York, and telegraphed to the London
papers--you don't suppose I shouldn't hear of it some time. And I came
right over--just as soon as I was convinced you needed me."

Olivia looked round with misty eyes. "I shall never forget it, Aunt Vic,
dear--nor your kindness to papa. He feels it more than he can possibly
express to you--your taking what he did so--so gently."

"Ma foi! The Guions must have money. When it comes to spending they're
not morally responsible. I'm the only one among them who ever had a
business head; and even with me, if it hadn't been for my wonderful
Hamlet and Tecla--But you can see what I am at heart--throwing two
million francs into your lap as if it were a box of bonbons."

"I'm not sure that you ought, you know."

"And what about the Guion family honor and all that? Who's to take care
of it if I don't? The minute I heard what had happened I held up my head
and said, Everything may go so long as the credit of the Guion name is
saved. N'est-ce pas? We can't live in debt to the old man who advanced
your papa the money."

"He isn't an old man at all," Olivia explained, quickly.

"Ça ne fait rien. His age isn't the question. I suppose he lent the
money expecting us to pay him back at a handsome rate of interest."

"No, he didn't. That's just it. He lent it to us--out of--out of--"

"Yes; out of what?"

"Out of pure goodness," she said, firmly.

"Fiddle-faddle! People don't do things out of pure goodness. The man who
seems to is either a sentimentalist or a knave. If he's a
sentimentalist, he does it for effect; if he's a knave, because it helps
roguery. There's always some ax to grind."

"I think you'd have to make an exception of Mr. Davenant."

"Davenant? Is that his name? Yes, I believe your papa did tell me
so--the boy Tom Davenant fished out of the slums."

With some indignation Olivia told the story of Davenant's birth and
adoption. "So you see," she went on, "he has goodness in his blood.
There's no reason why that shouldn't be inherited as much as--as
insanity--or a taste for alcohol."

"Stuff, dear! The man or the boy, or whatever he is, calculated on
getting something better than he gave. We must simply pay him off and
get rid of him. Noblesse oblige."

"We may get rid of him, Aunt Vic, but we can never pay him off."

"He'll be paid off, won't he, if we return his loan at an interest of
five--I'm willing to say six--per cent.?"

Olivia came forward, looking distressed. "Oh, I hope you won't, dear
Aunt Vic. I mean about the five or six per cent. Give him back his money
if you will, only give it back in the--in the princely way in which he
let us have it."

"Well, I call that princely--six per cent."

"Oh, please, Aunt Vic! You'd offend him. You'd hurt him. He's just the
sort of big, sensitive creature that's most easily wounded, and--"

"Tiens! You interest me. Stop fidgeting round the room and come and tell
me about him. Sit down," she commanded, pointing to the other corner of
the sofa. "There must be a lot I haven't heard."

If Olivia hesitated, it was chiefly because of her own eagerness to talk
of him, to sing his praises. Since, however, she must sooner or later
learn to do this with self-possession, she fortified herself to begin.
With occasional interruptions from her aunt she told the tale as she
understood it, taking as point of departure the evening when Davenant
came to dine at Tory Hill, on his return from his travels round the
world.

"So there was a time when you didn't like him," was Madame de Melcourt's
first comment.

"There was a time when I didn't understand him."

"But when you did understand him you changed your mind."

"I couldn't help it."

"And did you change anything more than your--mind?"

There was so much insinuation in the cracked voice that Olivia colored,
in spite of the degree in which she thought herself armed against all
surprises. It was a minute or more before she was prepared with an
answer.

"I changed my attitude toward him. Before that I'd been hostile and
insolent, and then--and then--I grew humble. Yes, Aunt Vic--humble. I
grew more than humble. I came to feel--well, as you might feel if you'd
struck a great St. Bernard dog who'd been rescuing you in the snow.
There's something about him that makes you think of a St. Bernard--so
big and true and loyal--"

"Did you ever think he might be in love with you?"

She was ready for this question, and had made up her mind to answer it
frankly. "Yes. I was afraid he was advancing the money on that account.
I felt so right up to--to a few days ago."

"And what happened then?"

"Drusilla told me he'd said he--wasn't."

Madame de Melcourt let that pass. "Did you think he'd fallen in love
with you all of a sudden when he came that night to dinner?"

She resolved to tell the whole truth. "I'd known him before. He asked me
to marry him years ago. And something happened. I hardly know how to
tell you. I didn't answer him."

"Didn't answer him?"

"I got up and walked away, right in the middle of--of what he was trying
to tell me."

"Ti-ens! And you had to take his money after all?"

Olivia bowed her head.

"Ça c'est trop fort," the old lady went on. "You're quite right then
when you say you'll never be able to pay him off, even if you get rid of
him. But he's paid _you_ off, hasn't he? It's a more beautiful situation
than I fancied. He didn't tell me that."

Olivia looked up. "He didn't tell you? Who?"

"Your papa," the old lady said, promptly. "It's perfectly lovely, isn't
it? I should think when you meet him you must feel frightfully ashamed.
Don't you?"

"I should if there wasn't something about him that--"

"And you'll never get over it," the old lady went on, pitilessly, "not
even after you've married the other man. The humiliation will haunt
you--toujours--toujours! N'est-ce pas? If it were I, I should want to
marry a man I'd done a thing like that to--just to carry it off. But
_you_ can't, can you? You've _got_ to marry the other man. Even if you
weren't so horribly in love with him, you'd have to marry him, when he's
stood by you like that. I should be ashamed of you if you didn't."

"Of course, Aunt Vic."

"If he were to back out that would be another thing. But as it is you've
got to swallow your humiliation, with regard to this Davenant. Or,
rather, you can't swallow it. You've simply got to live on it, so to
speak. You'll never be able to forget for an hour of the day that you
treated a man like that--and then took his money, will you? It isn't
exactly like striking a St. Bernard who's rescuing you in the snow.
It's like beating him first and then having him come and save you
afterward. Oh, la la! Quelle drôle de chose que la vie! Well, it's a
good thing we can return his money, at the least."

"You're so good about that, dear Aunt Vic. I didn't understand I was to
have it when I couldn't see my way to--to--"

"To marry Berteuil. That's all over and done with. I see you weren't
made for life in the real world. Anyhow," she added, taking a virtuous
air, "when my word was passed it was passed. Not that your _dot_ will do
you much good. It'll all have to go to settle the claims of this Mr.--By
the way, where is he? Why doesn't he come and be paid?"

"He's out in Michigan, at a little place called Stoughton."

"Then send for him."

"I'm not sure we can get him. Cousin Cherry has written to him three
times since he went away, and he doesn't answer."

"Cousin Cherry! What a goose! Who'd ever think she was the pretty
Charlotte Hawke that Rodney Temple fell in love with. What's the matter
with you, over here, that you all grow old at a minute's notice, so to
speak? I never saw such a lot of frumps as the women who used to be my
own contemporaries. Rodney and I were very good friends once. If I could
only have settled down in humdrum old Waverton--but we'll let bygones be
bygones, and send for your man."

"I'll ask Cousin Cherry to write to him again."

"Stuff, dear. That won't do any good. Wire him yourself, and tell him
I'm here."

"Oh, but, Aunt Vic, dear."

With little perkings of the head and much rolling of the eyes the
Marquise watched the warm color rise in Olivia's cheek and surge slowly
upward to the temples. Madame de Melcourt made signs of trying to look
anywhere and everywhere, up to the ceiling and down at the floor, rather
than be a witness of so much embarrassment. She emphasized her
discretion, too, by making a great show of seeing nothing in particular,
toying with her rings and bracelets till Olivia had sufficiently
recovered to be again commanded to send for Davenant.

"Tell him I'm here and that I want to have a look at him. Use my name so
that he'll see it's urgent. Then you can sign the telegram with your
own. Cousin Cherry! Stuff!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Later that day Madame de Melcourt was making a confession to Rodney
Temple.

"Oui, mon bon Rodney. It was love at first sight. The thing hadn't
happened to me for years."

"Had it been in the habit of happening?"

"In the habit of happening--that's too much to say. I may have had a
little toquade from time to time--I don't say no--of an innocence!--or
nearly of an innocence!--Mais que voulez-vous?--a woman in my
position!--a widow since I was so high!--and exposed to the most
flattering attentions. You know nothing about it over here. L'amour est
l'enfant de Bohème, as the song says, and, whatever you can say for
Waverton and Cambridge and Boston, you'll admit--"

He leaned back in his rocking-chair with a laugh. "One does the best one
can, Vic. We're children of opportunity as well as enfants de Bohème. If
your chances have been more generous, and I presume more tempting, than
ours, it isn't kind of you to come back and taunt us."

"Don't talk about tempting, Rodney. You can't imagine how tiresome those
men become--always on the hunt for money--always trying to find a wife
who'll support them without their having to work. I speak of the good
people, of course. With the bourgeoisie it's different. They work and
take care of their families like other people. Only they don't count. If
I hadn't money--they'd slam the door on me like that." She indicated the
violence of the act by gesture. "As it is, they smother me. There are
three of them at Melcourt-le-Danois at this present moment--Anne Marie
de Melcourt's two boys and one girl. They're all waiting for me to
supply the funds with which they're to make rich marriages. Is it any
wonder that I look upon what's done for my own niece as so much saved?
Henry's getting into such a hole seemed to me providential--gives me the
chance to snatch something away from them before they--and when it's to
go ultimately to _him_--"

"The young fellow you've taken such a fancy to?"

"You'd have taken a fancy to him, too, if you'd known only men who make
it a trade to ask all and give next to nothing in return. You'd be
smitten to the core by a man who asks nothing and offers all, if he were
as ugly as a gargoyle. But when he takes the form of a blond Hercules,
with eyes blue as the myosotis, and a mustache--mais une moustache!--and
with no idea whatever of the bigness of the thing he's doing! It was the
thunderbolt, Rodney--le coup de foudre--and no wonder!"

"I hope you told him so."

"I was very stiff with him. I sent him about his business just like
that." She snapped her fingers. "But I only meant it with reserves. I
let him see how I had been wronged--how cruelly Olivia had misunderstood
me--but I showed him, too, how I could forgive." She tore at her breast
as though to lay bare her heart. "Oh, I impressed him--not all at once
perhaps--but little by little--"

"As he came to know you."

"I wouldn't let him go away. He stayed at the inn in the village two
weeks and more. It's an old chef of mine who keeps it. And I learned all
his secrets. He thought he was throwing dust in my eyes, but he didn't
throw a grain. As if I couldn't see who was in love with who--after all
my experience! Ah, mon bon Rodney, if I'd been fifty years younger! And
yet if I'd been fifty years younger, I shouldn't have judged him at his
worth. He's the type to which you can do justice only when you've a
standard of comparison, n'est-ce pas? It's in putting him beside other
men--the best--even Ashley over there--that you see how big he is."

She tossed her hand in the direction of Ashley and Drusilla, sitting by
the tea-table at the other end of the room. Mrs. Temple had again found
errands of mercy to insure her absence.

"Il est très bien, cet Ashley," the Marquise continued,
"chic--distinguished--no more like a wooden man than any other
Englishman. Il est très bien--but what a difference!--two natures--the
one a mountain pool, fierce, deep, hemmed in all round--the other the
great sea. Voilà--Ashley et mon Davenant. And he helped me. He gave me
courage to stand up against the Melcourt--to run away from them. Oh yes,
we ran away--almost. I made a pretext for going to Paris--the old
pretext, the dentist. They didn't suspect at my age--how should
they?--or they wouldn't have let me come alone. Helie or Paul or Anne
Marie would have come with me. Oh, they smother me! But we ran away. We
took the train to Cherbourg, just like two eloping lovers--and the
bateau de luxe, the _Louisiana_ to New York. Mais hélas!--"

She paused to laugh, and at the same time to dash away a tear. "At New
York we parted, never to meet again--so he thinks. His work was done! He
went straight to that funny place in Michigan to join his pal. He's
there now--waiting to hear that Olivia has married her Englishman, as
you might wait to hear that sentence of death on some one you were fond
of had been carried out. Ah, mon Dieu, quel brave homme! I'm proud to
belong to the people who produced him. I don't know that I ever was
before."

"Oh, the world is full of brave fellows, when the moment comes to try
them."

"Perhaps. I'm not convinced. What about _him_?" She flicked her hand
again toward Ashley. "Would he stand a big test?"

"He's stood a good many of them, I understand. He's certainly been equal
to his duty here."

"He's done what a gentleman couldn't help doing. That's something, but
it's possible to ask more."

"I hope you're not going to ask it," he began, in some anxiety.

"He strikes me as a man who would grant what was wrung from him, while
the other--my blond Hercules--gives royally, like a king."

"There's a soul that climbs as by a ladder, and there's a soul that
soars naturally as a lark. I don't know that it matters which they do,
so long as they both mount upward."

"We shall see."

"What shall we see? I hope you're not up to anything, Vic?"

With another jerk of her hand in the direction of Ashley and Drusilla,
she said, "That's the match that should have--"

But the old man was out of his seat. "You must excuse me now, Vic. I've
some work to do."

"Yes, be off. Only--"

She put her forefinger on her lips, rolling her eyes under the brim of
her extravagant hat with an expression intended to exclude from their
pact of confidence not only the other two occupants of the room, but
every one else.

Olivia received the reply to her telegram: "Shall arrive in Boston
Wednesday night."

Considering it time to bring the purely financial side of the situation
under discussion, Madame de Melcourt explained to her niece that she,
the Marquise, had nothing to do, in her own person, with the
extraordinary person who was about to arrive. Her part would be
accomplished when once she had handed over the _dot_ either to Olivia or
to her trustees. As the passing of this sum through Miss Guion's hands
was to be no more than a formality, the question of trustees was not
worth taking up. With the transfer of securities for the amount agreed
upon from the one name to the other--a piece of business which would be
carried out by Davis & Stern--the Marquise considered that she would
have done all for which she could be called upon. Everything else
concerned Olivia and her father and Davenant. Her own interest in the
young man would be satisfied with a glance of curiosity.

The brief conversation to this effect having taken place before
luncheon, Madame de Melcourt pursued other aspects of the subject with
Colonel Ashley when that repast was ended and coffee was being served to
them in the library. Olivia having withdrawn to wait on her father,
Madame de Melcourt bade him light his cigar while she herself puffed
daintily at a cigarette. If she was a little grotesque in doing it, he
had seen more than one elderly Englishwoman who, in the same pastime,
was even more so.

Taking one thing with another, he liked his future great-aunt by
marriage. That is, he liked a connection that would bring him into touch
with such things in the world as he held to be important. While he had
the scorn natural to the Englishman of the Service class for anything
out of England that pretended to be an aristocracy, he admitted that the
old French royalist cause had claims to distinction. The atmosphere of
it clinging to one who was presumably in the heart of its counsels
restored him to that view of his marriage as an alliance between high
contracting powers which events in Boston had made so lamentably
untenable. If he was disconcerted, it was by her odd way of keeping him
at arm's-length.

"She doesn't like me, what?" he had more than once said to Olivia, and
with some misgiving.

Olivia could only answer: "I think she must. She's said a good many
times that you were chic and distinguished. That's a great deal for any
Englishman from her."

"She acts as if she had something up her sleeve."

That had become something like a conviction with him; but to-day he
flattered himself that he had made some progress in her graces. His own
spirits, too, were so high that he could be affable to Guion, who
appeared at table for the only time since the day of their first
meeting. Hollow-checked, hollow-eyed, his figure shrunken, and his
handsome hand grown so thin that the ring kept slipping from his finger,
Guion essayed, in view of his powerful relative's vindication--for so he
liked to think of it--to recapture some of his old elegance as a host.
To this Ashley lent himself with entire good-will, taking Guion's timid
claim for recognition as part of the new heaven and the new earth under
process of construction. In this greatly improved universe Olivia, too,
acquired in her lover's eyes a charm, a dignity, a softened grace beyond
anything he had dreamed of. If she seemed older, graver, sadder perhaps,
the change was natural to one who had passed through trials so sordid
and so searching. A month of marriage, a month of England, would restore
all her youth and freshness.

Nevertheless he was glad to be alone with Madame de Melcourt. It was the
moment he had waited for, the moment of paying some fitting tribute to
her generosity. He had said little of it hitherto, not wanting, as he
put it, "to drag it in by the hair of its head." He knew an opportunity
would arise; and it had arisen.

It was the sort of thing he could have done better had he not been
haunted by the Englishman's fear of being over-demonstrative. He was
easily capable of turning a nice little speech. Apart from the fear of
transgressing the canons of negative good form he would have enjoyed
turning one. As it was, he assumed a stammer and a drawl, jerking out a
few inarticulate phrases of which the lady could distinguish only "so
awfully good of you" and "never forget your jolly kindness." This being
masculine, soldier-like, and British, he was hurt to notice an amused
smile on the Marquise's lips. He could have sworn that she felt the
speech inadequate to the occasion. She would probably have liked it
better had it been garnished with American flourishes or French
ornamentation. "She's taking me for a jolly ass," he said to himself,
and reddened hotly.

In contrast to his deliberate insufficiency the old lady's thin voice
was silvery and precise. Out of some bit of obscure wilfulness, roused
by his being an Englishman, she accentuated her Parisian affectations.

"I'm very much delighted, Col-on-el," she said, giving the military
title its three distinct French syllables, "but you must not think me
better than I am. I'm very fond of my niece--and of her father. After
all, they stand nearer to me than any one else in the world. They're all
I've got of my very own. In any case, they should have had the money
some day--when I--that is, I'd made my will n'est-ce pas? But what
matters a little sooner or a little later? And I want my niece to be
happy. I want a great many things; but when I've sifted them all, I
think I want that more than anything else."

Ashley bowed. "We shall always feel greatly indebted--" he began,
endeavoring to be more elegant than in his words of a few minutes
earlier.

"I want her to be happy, Col-on-el. She deserves it. She's a noble
creature, with a heart of gold and a spirit of iron. And she loves me, I
think."

"I know she does, by Jove!"

"And I can't think of any one else who does love me for myself." She
gave a thin, cackling laugh. "They love my money. Le bon Dieu has
counted me worthy of having a good deal during these later years. And
they're all very fond of it. But she's fond of _me_. I was very angry
with her once; but now I want her to be happy with the man--with the man
she's in love with. So when Mr. Davenant came and told me of your noble
character--"

"The devil he did!"

Ashley sprang out of his chair. The cigar dropped from his limp fingers.
In stooping to pick it up he caught the echo of his own exclamation. "I
beg your pardon--" he began, when he had raised himself. He grew redder
than ever; his eyes danced.

"Ça ne fait rien, Col-on-el. It's an expression of which I myself often
use the equivalent--in French. But I don't wonder you're pleased. Your
friend Mr. Davenant made the journey to Europe purposely to tell me how
highly you were qualified as a suitor for my niece's hand. When one has
a friend like that--"

"But he's not my friend."

"You surprise me, Col-on-el. He spoke of you with so much praise--so
much affection, I might say. He said no one could be so worthy to marry
my niece--no one could make her so happy--no one could give her such a
distinguished position in the world--no one was so fine a fellow in his
own person--"

He looked mystified. "But he's out there in Michigan--"

She puffed delicately at her cigarette. "He stayed with me two weeks at
Melcourt-le-Danois. That is, he stayed at the inn in the village. It was
the same thing. I was very angry with my niece before that. It was he
who made me see differently. If it were not for him I shouldn't be
here. He traveled to France expressly to beg my help--how shall I
say?--on your behalf--in simplifying things--so that you and Olivia
might be free from your sense of obligation to him--and might marry--"

"Did he say he was in love with her himself?"

She ignored the hoarse suffering in his voice to take another puff or
two at her cigarette. "Ma foi, Col-on-el, he didn't have to."

"Did he say--" He swallowed hard, and began again, more hoarsely: "Did
he say she was--in love with--with _him_?"

There was a hint of rebuke in her tone. "He's a very loyal gentleman. He
didn't."

"Did he make you think--?"

"What he made me think, Col-on-el, is my own affair."

He jumped to his feet, throwing his cigar violently into the fire. For a
minute or two he stood glaring at the embers. When he turned on her it
was savagely.

"May I ask your motive in springing this on me, Marquise?"

"Mon Dieu, Col-on-el, I thought you'd like to know what a friend you
have."

"Damn his friendship. That's not the reason. You've something up your
sleeve."

She looked up at him innocently. "Have I? Then I must leave it to you to
tell me what it is. But when you do," she added, smiling, "I hope you'll
take another tone. In France men are gallant with women--"

"And in England women are straight with men. What they have to say they
say. They don't lay snares, or lie in ambush."

She laughed. "Quant à cela, Col-on-el, il y en a pour tous les goûts,
même en Angleterre."

"I'll bid you good-by, madame."

He bowed stiffly, and went out into the hail. She continued to smoke
daintily, pensively, while she listened to him noisily pulling on his
overcoat and taking his stick from the stand. As he passed the library
door he stopped on the threshold.

"By Gad, she's _mine_!" he said, fiercely.

She got up and went to him, taking him by the lapel of the coat. There
was something like pity in her eyes as she said: "My poor fellow, nobody
has raised that question. What's more, nobody _will_ raise it--unless
you do yourself."




XXIII


Ashley's craving was for space and air. He felt choked, strangled. There
was a high wind blowing, carrying a sleety rain. It was a physical
comfort to turn into the teeth of it.

He took a road straggling out of the town toward the remoter suburbs,
and so into the country. He marched on, his eyes unseeing, his mouth set
grimly--goaded by a kind of frenzy to run away from that which he knew
he could not leave behind. It was like fleeing from something
omnipresent. Though he should turn his back on it never so sternly and
travel never so fast, it would be with him. It had already entered into
his life as a constituent element; he could no more get rid of it than
of his breath or his blood.

And yet the thing itself eluded him. In the very attempt to apprehend it
by sight or name, he found it mysteriously beyond his grasp. It was like
an enemy in the air, deadly but out of reach. It had struck him, though
he could not as yet tell where. He could only stride onward through the
wind and rain, as a man who has been shot can ride on till he falls.

So he tramped for an hour or more, finding himself at last amid bleak,
dreary marshes, over which the November twilight was coming down. He
felt lonely, desolate, far from his familiar things, far from home. His
familiar things were his ambitions, as home was that life of
well-ordered English dignity, in which to-morrow will bear some relation
to to-day.

He felt used up by the succession of American shocks, of American
violences. They had reduced him to a condition of bewilderment. For four
or five weeks he had scarcely known from minute to minute where he
stood. He had maintained his ground as best he was able, holding out for
the moment when he could marry his wife and go his way; and now, when
ostensibly the hour had come in which to do it, it was only that he
might see confusion worse confounded.

He turned back toward the town. He did so with a feeling of futility in
the act. Where should he go? What should he do? How was he to deal with
this new, extraordinary feature in the case? It was impossible to return
to Tory Hill, as if the Marquise had told him nothing, and equally
impossible to make what she had said a point of departure for anything
else. If he made it a point of departure for anything at all, it could
only be for a step which his whole being rebelled against taking.

It was a solution of the instant's difficulties to avoid the turning to
Tory Hill and go on to Drusilla Fane's. In the wind and rain and
gathering darkness the thought of her fireside was cheering. She would
understand him, too. She had always understood him. It was her knowledge
of the English point of view that made her such an efficient pal.
During all the trying four or five weeks through which he had passed she
had been able to give him sympathetic support just where and when he
needed it. It was something to know she would give it to him again.

As he told her of Davenant's journey to France he could see her eyes
grow bigger and blacker than ever in the flickering firelight. She kept
them on him all the while he talked. She kept them on him as from time
to time she lifted her cup and sipped her tea.

"Then that's why he didn't answer mother's letters," she said, absently,
when he had finished. "He wasn't there."

"He wasn't there, by Jove! And don't you see what a fix he's put me in?"

She replied, still absently: "I'm not sure that I do."

"He's given away the whole show to me. The question is now whether I can
take it, what?"

"He hasn't given away anything you didn't have before."

"He's given away something he might perhaps have had himself."

She drew back into the shadow so that he might not see her coloring. She
had only voice enough to say: "What makes you think so?"

"Don't _you_ think so?"

"That's not a fair question."

"It's a vital one."

"To you--yes. But--"

"But not to you. Oh, I understand that well enough. But you've been
such a good pal that I thought you might help me to see--"

"I'm afraid I can't help you to see anything. If I were to try I might
mislead you."

"But you must _know_, by Jove! Two women can't be such pals as Olivia
and you--"

"If I did know I shouldn't tell you. It's something you should find out
for yourself."

"Find out! I've _asked_ her."

"Well, if she's told you, isn't that enough?"

"It would be enough in England. But here, where words don't seem to have
the same meaning as they do anywhere else--and surprises are sprung on
you--and people have queer, complicated motives--and do preposterous,
unexpected things--"

"Peter's going to see old Cousin Vic might be unexpected; but I don't
think you can call it preposterous."

"It's preposterous to have another man racing about the world trying to
do you good, by Jove!"

"He wasn't trying to do you good so much as not to do you harm. He
thought he'd done that, apparently, by interfering with Cousin Henry's
affairs in the first place. His asking the old Marquise to come to the
rescue was only an attempt to make things easier for you."

He sprang to his feet. "And he's got me where I must either call his
bluff or--or--or accept his beastly sacrifice."

He tugged fiercely, first at one end, then at the other, of the
bristling, horizontal mustache. Drusilla tried to speak calmly.

"He's not making a sacrifice if there was nothing for him to give up."

"That's what I must find out."

She considered it only loyal to say: "It's well to remember that in
making the attempt you may do more harm than good. 'Where the apple
reddens, never pry, lest we lose our Edens'--You know the warning."

"Yes, I know. That's Browning. In other words, it means, let well enough
alone."

"Which isn't bad advice, you know."

"Which isn't bad advice--except in love. Love won't put up with
reserves. It must have all--or it will take nothing."

He dropped into a low chair at the corner of the hearth. Wielding the
poker in both hands, he knocked sparks idly from a smoldering log. It
was some minutes before she ventured to say:

"And suppose you discovered that you couldn't _get_ all?"

"I've thought that out. I should go home, and ask to be allowed to join
the first punitive expedition sent out--one of those jolly little
parties from which they don't expect more than half the number to come
back. There's one just starting now--against the Carrals--up on the
Tibet frontier. I dare say I could catch it."

Again some minutes went by before she said: "Is it as bad as all that?"

"It's as bad as all that."

She got up because she could no longer sit still. His pain was almost
more than she could bear. At the moment she would have given life just
to be allowed to lay her hand soothingly on his shoulder or to stroke
his bowed head. As it was, she could barely give herself the privilege
of taking one step toward him, and even in doing this she was compelled
to keep behind him, lest she should betray herself in the approach.

"Couldn't I--?"

The offer of help was in the tone, in its timid beseeching.

He understood it, and shook his head without looking up.

"No," he said, briefly. "No. No one can."

She remained standing behind him, because she hadn't the strength to go
away. He continued to knock sparks from the log. Repulsed from the
sphere of his suffering, she was thrown back on her own. She wondered
how long she should stand there, how long he would sit, bending like
that, over the dying fire. It was the most intolerable minute of her
life, and yet he didn't know it. Just for the instant she resented
that--that while he could get the relief of openness and speech, she
must be condemned forever to shame and silence. If she could have thrown
herself on her knees beside him and flung her arms about his neck,
crying, "I love you; I love you! Whoever doesn't--_I_ do!--_I_ do!" she
would have felt that life had reached fruition.

The minutes became more unendurable. In sheer self-defense she was
obliged to move, to say something, to break the tensity of the strain.
One step--the single step by which she had dared to draw nearer him,
stretching out yearning hands toward him--one step sufficed to take her
back to the world of conventionalities and commonplaces, where the
heart's aching is taboo.

She must say something, no matter what, and the words that came were:
"Won't you have another cup of tea?"

He shook his head, still without looking up. "Thanks; no."

But she was back again on her own ground, back from the land of
enchantment and anguish. It was like returning to an empty home after a
journey of poignant romance. She was mistress of herself again, mistress
of her secret and her loneliness. She could command her voice, too. She
could hear herself saying, as if some one else were speaking from the
other side of the room:

"It seems to me you take it too tragically to begin with--"

"It isn't to begin with. I saw there was a screw loose from the first.
And since then some one has told me that she was--half in love with him,
by Jove!--as it was."

She remained standing beside the tea-table. "That must have been Cousin
Henry. He'd have a motive in thinking so--not so much to deceive you as
to deceive himself. But if it's any comfort to you to know it, I've
talked to them both. I suppose they spoke to me confidentially, and I
haven't felt justified in betraying them. But rather than see you
suffer--"

He put the poker in its place among the fire-irons and swung round in
his chair toward her. "Oh, I say! It isn't suffering, you know. That is,
it isn't--"

She smiled feebly. "Oh, I know what it is. You don't have to explain.
But I'll tell you. I asked Peter--or practically asked him--some time
ago--if he was in love with her--and he said he wasn't."

His face brightened. "Did he, by Jove?"

"And when I told her that--the other day--she said--"

"Yes? Yes? She said--?"

"She didn't put it in so many words--but she gave me to understand--or
_tried_ to give me to understand--that it was a relief to her--because,
in that case, she wasn't obliged to have him on her mind. A woman _has_
those things on her mind, you know, about one man when she loves
another."

He jumped up. "I say! You're a good pal. I shall never forget it."

He came toward her, but she stepped back at his approach. She was more
sure of herself in the shadow.

"Oh, it's nothing--"

"You see," he tried to explain, "it's this way with me. I've made it a
rule in my life to do--well, a little more than the right thing--to do
the high thing, if you understand--and that fellow has a way of getting
so damnably on top. I can't allow it, you know. I told you so the other
day."

"You mean, if he does something fine, you must do something finer."

He winced at this. "I can't go on swallowing his beastly favors, don't
you see? And hang it all! if he is--if he _is_ my--my rival--he must
have a show."

"And how are you going to give him a show if he won't take it?"

He started to pace up and down the room. "That's your beastly America,
where everything goes by freaks--where everything is queer and
inconsequent and tortuous, and you can't pin any one down."

"It seems to me, on the contrary, that you have every one pinned down.
You've got everything your own way, and yet you aren't satisfied. Peter
has taken himself off; old Cousin Vic has paid the debts; and Olivia is
ready to go to church and marry you on the first convenient day. What
more can you ask?"

"That's what _she_ said, by Jove!--the old Marquise. She said the
question would never be raised unless I raised it."

Drusilla tried to laugh. "Eh, bien? as she'd say herself."

He paused in front of her. "Eh, bien, there is something else; and," he
added, tapping his forehead sharply, "I'll be hanged if I know what it
is."

She was about to say something more when the sound of the shutting of
the street door stopped her. There was much puffing and stamping, with
shouts for Jane to come and take an umbrella.

"I say, that's your governor. I'll go and talk to him."

He went without another look at her. She steadied herself with the tips
of her fingers on the tea-table, in order not to swoon. She knew she
wouldn't swoon; she only felt like it, or like dying. But all she could
do was limply to pour herself out an extra cup of tea and drink it.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the library Ashley was taking heart of grace. He had come to ask
advice, but he was really pointing out the things that were in his
favor. He repeated Drusilla's summing-up of them almost word for word.

"You see, as far as that goes, I've everything my own way. No question
will be raised unless I raise it. The fellow has taken himself off; the
Marquise has most generally assumed the family liabilities; and Olivia
is ready to come to church with me and be married on the first
convenient day. I should be satisfied with that, now shouldn't I?"

The old man nodded. "Your difficulties do seem to have been smoothed
out."

He sat, fitting the tips of his fingers together and swinging his leg,
in his desk-chair. The light of the green-shaded desk-lamp alone lit up
the room. In the semi-obscurity porcelains and potteries gleamed like
crystals in a cave. Ashley paced the floor, emerging from minute to
minute out of the gloom into the radiance of the lamp.

"I'm not called on to go poking behind things to see what's there, now
am I?"

"Not in the least."

"I'm willing to consider every one, and I think I do. But there are
limits, by Jove! Now, really?"

"The minute we recognize limits it's our duty not to go beyond them.
It's thus far and no farther--for the man who knows the stretch of his
tether, at any rate. The trouble with Peter is that his tether is
elastic. It'll spin out as far as he sees the need to go. For the rest
of us there are limits, as you say; but about him there's
something--something you might call limitless."

Ashley rounded sharply. "You mean he's so big that no one can be
bigger."

"Not exactly. I mean that very few of us _need_ to be as big as that.
It's all very well for him; but most of us have to keep within the
measure of our own capacity."

"And sit down under him, while he looms up into God knows where?"

"Well, wouldn't that be your idea?"

"Can't say that it is. My idea is that when I take my rights and keep
them, I'm as big as any one."

"Quite so; as big as any one--who takes his rights and keeps them.
That's very true."

Ashley stopped, one hand behind him, the other supporting him as he
leaned on the desk. "And that's what I propose to do," he said,
aggressively.

"It's a very high ideal."

"I propose to accept the status quo without asking any more questions."

"I should think that would be a very good plan. A wise man--one of the
wisest--wrote, apropos of well-disposed people who were seeking a
standard of conduct: 'Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that
thing which he alloweth.' I should think you'd have every reason for
that kind of self-approval."

"Do you mean that, sir? or are you--trying it on?"

"I'm certainly not trying it on. The man who takes his rights and keeps
them can be amply justified. If there's a counsel of perfection that
goes beyond that standard--well, it isn't given to all men to receive
it."

"Then you think it isn't given to me. You'd put me down as a good sort
of chap who comes in second best."

"What makes you think I should do that?"

"Because--because--hang it all! If I let this fellow keep ahead of
me--why, I _should_ come in second best."

"You say _keep_ ahead of me. Do you think he's ahead of you now?"

Ashley straightened himself. He looked uncomfortable. "He's got a pull,
by Jove! He made that journey to France--and cracked me up to the
Marquise--and wheedled her round--when all the while he must have known
that he was hammering nails into his own coffin. He did it, too, after
I'd insulted him and we'd had a row."

"Oh, that's nothing. To a fellow like him that sort of thing comes
easy."

"It wouldn't come easy to me, by Jove!"

"Then it would be all the more to your credit, if you ever did anything
of the kind."

The Englishman bounded away. Once more he began to pace the floor
restlessly. The old man took his pipe from a tray, and his
tobacco-pouch from a drawer. Having filled the bowl, with meditative
leisure he looked round for a match. "Got a light?"

Ashley struck a vesta on the edge of his match-box and applied it to the
old man's pipe.

"Should you say," he asked, while doing it, "that I ought to attempt
anything in that line?"

"Certainly not--unless you want to--to get ahead."

"I don't want to stay behind."

"Then, it's for you to judge, my son."

There was something like an affectionate stress on the two concluding
monosyllables. Ashley backed off, out of the lamplight.

"It's this way," he explained, stammeringly; "I'm a British officer and
gentleman. I'm a little more than that--since I'm a V.C. man--and a
fellow--dash it all, I might as well say it!--I'm a fellow they've got
their eye on--in the line of high office, don't you know? And I can't--I
simply _can't_--let a chap like that make me a present of all his
chances--"

"Did he have any?"

Ashley hesitated. "Before God, sir, I don't know--but I'm inclined to
think--he had. If so, I suppose they're of as much value to him as mine
to me."

"But not of any more."

He hesitated again. "I don't know about that. Perhaps they are. The Lord
knows I don't say that lightly, for mine are--Well, we needn't go into
that. But I've got a good deal in my life, and I don't imagine that he,
poor devil--"

"Oh, don't worry. A rich soil is never barren. When nothing is planted
in it, Nature uses it for flowers."

Ashley answered restively. "I see, sir, your sympathies are all on his
side."

"Not at all. Quite the contrary. My certainties are on his side. My
sympathies are on yours."

"Because you think I need them."

"Because I think you may."

"In case I--"

"In case you should condemn yourself in the thing you're going to
allow."

"But what's it to be?"

"That's for you to settle with yourself."

He was silent a minute. When he spoke it was with some conviction. "I
should like to do the right thing, by Jove!--the straight thing--if I
only knew what it was."

"Oh, there'll be no trouble about that. In the Street called Straight,
my son, there are lights to show the way."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Rum old cove," was Ashley's comment to himself as he went back to
Boston. "Got an answer to everything."

From the hotel he telephoned an excuse to Olivia for his unceremonious
departure from Tory Hill. "Had an upset," was the phrase by which he
conveyed his apologies, leaving it to her to guess the nature of his
mischance. As she showed no curiosity on the point, he merely
promised to come to luncheon in the morning.

During his dinner he set himself to think, though, amid the
kaleidoscopic movement of the hotel dining-room, he got little beyond
the stage of "mulling." Such symptoms of decision as showed themselves
through the evening lay in his looking up the dates of sailing of the
more important liners, and the situation of the Carral country on the
map. He missed, however, the support of his principle to be Rupert
Ashley at his best. That guiding motto seemed to have lost its force
owing to the eccentricities of American methods of procedure. If he was
still Rupert Ashley, he was Rupert Ashley sadly knocked about, buffeted,
puzzled, grown incapable of the swift judgment and prompt action which
had hitherto been his leading characteristics.

He was still beset by uncertainties when he went out to Waverton next
morning. Impatient for some form of action, he made an early start. On
the way he considered Rodney Temple's words of the previous afternoon,
saying to himself: "In the Street called Straight there are lights to
show the way, by Jove! Gad! I should like to know where they are."

[Illustration: ASHLEY GOT THE IMPRESSION THAT THEIR CONVERSATION WAS
EARNEST, CONFIDENTIAL.]

Nevertheless, it had a clarifying effect on his vision to find, on
walking into the drawing-room at Tory Hill, Miss Guion seated in
conversation with Peter Davenant. As he had the advantage of seeing them
a second before they noticed him, he got the impression that their
conversation was earnest, confidential. Olivia was seated in a corner of
the sofa, Davenant in a low chair that gave him the appearance of being
at her feet.

It was exactly the stimulus Ashley needed to bring his faculties into
action. He was at once in possession of all his powers. The feeling
inspired by the sight of them together transformed him on the instant
into the quick, shrewd, diplomatic officer in whom he recognized
himself. It was a feeling too complicated to be called jealousy, though
jealousy might have been in it as an ingredient pang. If so, it was
entirely subordinate to his new sense--or rather his old sense--of being
equal to the occasion. As he crossed the room he felt no misgiving, no
hesitation. Neither did he need to forecast, however rapidly, his plan
of speech or action, since he knew that in urgent cases it was always
given him. If he had to define this sudden confidence he might have said
that Rupert Ashley at his best had been restored to life again, but even
that would not have expressed the fullness of his consciousness of
power.

He nodded to Davenant before shaking hands with Miss Guion. "Hello! Back
again?"

Davenant got up from his low chair with some embarrassment. Ashley bowed
over Olivia's hand with unusual courtliness. He seated himself in the
other corner of the sofa, as one who had a right to the place.

"I had to come East on business," Davenant explained, at once.

Olivia hastened to corroborate this statement. "Aunt Vic wanted Mr.
Davenant to come--to settle up all the things--"

"And I had another reason," Davenant interrupted, nervously. "I was just
beginning to tell Miss Guion about it when you came in. I've a job out
there--in my work--that would suit Mr. Guion. It would be quite in his
line--legal adviser to a company--and would give him occupation. He'd be
earning money, and wouldn't feel laid aside; and if he was ill I could
look after him as well as any one. I--I'd like it."

Olivia looked inquiringly at Ashley. Her eyes were misty.

"Hadn't you better talk to _him_ about it?" Ashley said.

"I thought I'd better speak to you and Miss Guion first. I understand
you've offered to--to take him--"

"I shouldn't interfere with what suited him better, in any case. By the
way, how did you like the _Louisiana_?"

Davenant's jaw dropped. His blue eyes were wide with amazement. It was
Olivia who undertook to speak, with a little air of surprise that Ashley
should make such an odd mistake.

"Mr. Davenant wasn't on the _Louisiana_. It was Aunt Vic. Mr. Davenant
has just come from the West. You do that by train."

"Of course he was on the _Louisiana_. Landed on the--let me see!--she
sailed again yesterday!--landed on the 20th, didn't you?"

"No, no," Olivia corrected again, smiling. "That was the day Aunt Vic
landed. You're getting every one mixed."

"But they came together," Ashley persisted. "He brought her. Didn't
you?"

The look on Olivia's face frightened Davenant. He got up and stood
apologetically behind his chair. "You'll have to forgive me, Miss
Guion," he stammered. "I--I deceived you. I couldn't think of anything
else to do."

She leaned forward, looking up at him. "But I don't know what you did,
as it is. I can't understand--what--what any one is saying."

"Then I'll tell you, by Jove! All the time you thought he was out there
at Michigan he was over in France, following up the Marquise. Tracked
her like a bloodhound, what? Told her the whole story--how we'd got to a
deadlock--and everything. Made her think that unless she came and bailed
us out we'd be caught there for the rest of our lives."

Olivia's eyes were still lifted to Davenant's. "Is that true?"

"It's true, by Jove!--true as you live. What's more, he cracked me up as
though I was the only man alive--said that when it came to a question of
who was worthy--worthy to marry you--he wasn't fit to black my boots."

"No," Davenant cried, fiercely. "There was no question of me."

"Bosh! Bosh, my good fellow! When a man does what you've done there's no
question of any one but him."

The color was hot in Davenant's cheeks, but he himself could not have
told whether it came from astonishment or anger. "Since Colonel Ashley
knows so well what happened, I shall leave him to tell it."

He was about to make his escape, when Olivia stopped him. "No, no.
Wait--please wait. Tell me why you did it."

"I'll tell you," Ashley broke in. He spoke with a kind of nervous
jauntiness. "I'll tell you, by Jove! We had a row. I called him a cad. I
called him a damned cad. There _was_ a damned cad present on that
occasion--only--I didn't hit the right nail on the head. But that's not
what I'm coming to. He struck me. He struck me right in the teeth, by
Jove! And when a man strikes you, it's an insult that can only be wiped
out by blood. Very well; he's offered it--his blood. He didn't wait for
me to draw it. I suppose he thought I wouldn't go in for the heroic. So
of his own accord he went over there to France and shed his heart's
blood, in the hope that I might overlook his offence. All right, old
chap; I overlook it."

With a laugh Ashley held his hand up toward Davenant, who ignored it.

"Miss Guion," Davenant said, huskily, "Colonel Ashley is pleased to put
his own interpretation on what was in itself a very simple thing. You
mayn't think it a very creditable thing, but I'll tell you just what
happened, and you can draw your own conclusions. I went over to France,
and saw your aunt, the Marquise, and asked her to let me have my money
back. That's the plain truth of it. She'll tell you so herself. I'd
heard she was very fond of you--devoted to you--and that she was very
rich and generous--and so I thought, if I told her exactly how matters
stood, it would be a good chance to--to--recoup myself for--the loan."

Ashley sprang up with another laugh. "He does that well, doesn't he?" he
said to Olivia. "Come along, old boy," he added, slipping his arm
through Davenant's. "If I let you stay here you'll perjure your very
soul."

Davenant allowed himself to be escorted to the door. Over his shoulder
Ashley called back to Olivia: "Fellows are never good friends till after
they've had a fight."




XXIV


When Ashley, after pushing Davenant gently out into the hall, returned
to Olivia, she was standing by the mantelpiece, where the five K'ang-hsi
vases had been restored to their place in honor of the Marquise.

"Rum chap, isn't he?" Ashley observed. "So awfully queer and American.
No Englishman would ever have taken a jaunt like that--after the old
lady--on another chap's behalf. It wouldn't go down, you know."

Olivia, leaning on the mantelpiece, with face partially turned from him,
made no reply.

He allowed some minutes to pass before saying: "When I asked him how he
liked the _Louisiana_ I wanted to know. I'm thinking of taking her on
her next trip home."

She turned slightly, lifting her eyes. There was a wonderful light in
them, and yet a light that seemed to shine from afar. "Wouldn't that be
rather soon?"

"It would give me time for all I want. Now that I'm here I'd better take
a look at New York and Washington, and perhaps get a glimpse of your
South. I could do that in three weeks."

She seemed to have some difficulty in getting her mind to follow his
words. "I don't think I understand you."

There was a smile on his lips as he said: "Don't you infer anything?"

"If I _inferred_ anything, it would be that you think of going
home--alone."

"Well, that's it."

She turned fully round. For a long minute they stood staring at each
other. Time and experience seemed both to pass over them before she
uttered the one word: "Why?"

"Isn't it pretty nearly--self-evident?"

She shook her head. "Not to me."

"I'm surprised at that. I thought you would have seen how well we'd
played our game, and that it's--up."

"I don't see--not unless you're trying to tell me that you've--that your
feelings have undergone a--"

He was still smiling rather mechanically, though he tugged nervously at
the end of his horizontal mustache. "Wouldn't it be possible--now that
everything has turned out so--so beautifully--wouldn't it be possible to
let the rest go without--without superfluous explanations?"

"I'm ready to do everything you like; but I can't help being surprised."

"That must be because I've been more successful than I thought I was. I
fancied that--when I saw how things were with you--you saw how they were
with me--and that--"

"Saw how they were with you? Do you mean?--No, you can't mean!--it
isn't--Drusilla?"

Since Drusilla would do as well as another, he still stood smiling. She
clasped her hands. Her face was all aglow.

"Oh, I should be so glad! It's only within a few days that I've
seen--how it was--with--"

He hastened to interrupt her, though he had no idea of what she was
going to say. "Then so long as you do see--"

"Oh yes; I--I begin to see. I'm afraid I've been very stupid. You've
been so kind--so noble--when all the while--"

"We won't discuss that, what? We won't discuss each other at all. Even
if you go your way and I go mine, we shall still be--"

He didn't finish, because she dropped again to the sofa, burying her
face in the cushions. It was the first time he had ever seen her give
way to deep emotion. If he had not felt so strong to carry the thing
through to the end, he would have been unnerved. As it was, he sat down
beside her, bending over her bowed head. He made no attempt to touch
her.

"I can't bear it," he could hear her panting. "I can't bear it."

"What is it that you can't bear? The pain?" She nodded without raising
her head.

"Or the happiness?" he asked, gently. She nodded again.

"That is," he went on, "pain for me--and happiness about--about--the
other chap."

She made the same mute sign of affirmation.

"Then, perhaps, that's just as it should be."

       *       *       *       *       *

When Ashley got out to the road Davenant was still standing by the gate,
uncertain whether to turn back to the house or go away. Ashley continued
to smile jauntily. If he was white about the temples and sallow in the
cheeks there was no one to notice it.

"Miss Guion wants to see you," he announced to Davenant. "It's about
that matter of her father. I dare say you'll pull it off. No, not just
now," he added, as Davenant started to go up the driveway. "She--she's
busy. Later will do. Say this afternoon. Come along with me. I've got
something to tell you. I'm on my way to the Temples'."

Once more Ashley slipped his arm through Davenant's, but they walked on
in silence. The silence continued till they were on the Embankment, when
Ashley said: "On second thoughts, I sha'n't tell you what I was going to
just now."

"That's all right," Davenant rejoined; and no more was said till they
reached Rodney Temple's door.

"Good-by." Ashley offered his hand. "Good-by. You're a first-rate sort.
You deserve everything you're--you're coming in for."

Davenant could only wring the proffered hand wonderingly and continue on
his way.

Inside the house Ashley asked only for Drusilla. When she came to the
drawing-room he refused to sit down. He explained his hurry, on the
ground that he was on his way to Boston to take the earliest possible
train for New York.

"Oh yes. That's it," he said, in answer to her dumb looks of inquiry.
"It couldn't go on, you see. You must have known it--in spite of what
you told me last night. You've been an out-and-out good pal. You've
cheered me up more than a bit all the time I've been here. If it hadn't
been for you--Oh yes, I'm hit; but not hit so hard that I can't still go
on fighting--"

"Not in the Carral country, I hope."

"N-no. On second thoughts that would be only running away. I'm not going
to run away. Wounds as bad as mine have healed with a bit of nursing,
and--Well, good-by. Say good-by to your father and mother for me, will
you?--especially to your governor. Rum old chap, but sound--sound as--as
Shakespeare and the Bible. Good-by once more. Meet again some time."

It was at the door, to which she accompanied him, that he said: "By the
way, when are you coming home?"

She called all her dignity to her aid in order to reply lightly: "Oh, I
don't know. Not for ages and ages. Perhaps not at all. I may stay
permanently over here. I don't know."

"Oh, I say--"

"In any case I'm here for the winter."

"Oh, but I say, by Jove! That's forever. You'll be back before spring?"

She weakened in spite of herself. "I couldn't possibly leave till after
Christmas."

"Christmas! It's the end of November now. Well, that's not so bad.
Expect to be in Southsea some time early in the new year. See you then."

He had gone down the steps when he turned again. Drusilla was still
standing in the open doorway.

"It's awfully queer, but I feel as if--you'll laugh, I know--but I feel
as if I'd been kept from the commission of a crime. Funny, isn't it?
Well, I'll be off. See you in Southsea not later than the middle of
January. Good-by again; and don't forget my message to your governor."




XXV


It was late in the afternoon when Davenant reappeared at Tory Hill,
having tramped the streets during most of the time since leaving Ashley
in the morning. He was nervous. He was even alarmed. He had little clue
to Olivia's judgment on his visit to the Marquise, and he found Ashley's
hints mysterious.

It was reassuring, therefore, to have her welcome him with gentle
cordiality into the little oval sitting-room, where he found her at her
desk. She made him take the most comfortable seat, while she herself
turned partially round, her arm stretched along the back of her chair.
Though the room was growing dim, there was still a crimson light from
the sunset.

He plunged at once into the subject that had brought him, explaining the
nature of the work her father would be called upon to do. It would be
easy work, though real work, just what would be within his powers. There
would be difficulties, some arising from the relationship of the
Massachusetts bar to that of Michigan, and others on which he touched
more lightly; but he thought they could all be overcome. Even if that
proved to be impossible, there were other things he knew of that Mr.
Guion could do--things quite in keeping with his dignity.

"I've already talked to papa about it," she said. "He's very
grateful--very much touched."

"There's no reason for that. I should like his company. I'm--I'm fond of
him."

For a few minutes she seemed to be pondering, absently. "There's
something I should like to ask you," she said, at last.

"Yes, Miss Guion? What is it?"

"When people have done so much harm as--as we've done, do you think it's
right that they should get off scot-free--without punishment?"

"I don't know anything about that, Miss Guion. It seems to me I'm not
called upon to know. Where we see things going crooked we must butt in
and help to straighten them. Even when we've done that to the best of
our powers, I guess there'll still be punishment enough to go round.
Outside the law-courts, that's something we don't have to look after."

Again she sat silent, watching the shifting splendor of the sunset. He
could see her profile set against the deep-red glow like an intaglio on
sard.

"I wonder," she said, "if you have any idea of the many things you've
taught me?"

"I?" He almost jumped from his seat. "You're laughing at me."

"You've taught me," she went on, quietly, "how hard and narrow my
character has been. You've taught me how foolish a thing pride can be,
and how unlovely we can make even that noble thing we call a spirit of
independence. You've taught me how big human nature is--how vast and
deep and--and _good_. I don't think I believed in it before. I know I
didn't. I thought it was the right thing, the clever thing, to distrust
it, to discredit it. I did that. It was because, until I knew you--that
is, until I knew you as you _are_--I had no conception of it--not any
more than a peasant who's always starved on barren, inland hills has a
conception of the sea."

He was uncomfortable. He was afraid. If she continued to speak like that
he might say something difficult to withdraw. He fell back awkwardly on
the subject of her father and the job at Stoughton.

"And you won't have to worry about him, Miss Guion, when you're over
there in England," he said, earnestly, as he summed up the advantages he
had to offer, "because if he's ill, I'll look after him, and if he's
_very_ ill, I'll cable. I promise you I will--on my solemn word."

"You won't have to do that," she said, simply, "because I'm going, too."

Again he almost jumped from his chair. "Going, too? Going where?"

"Going to Stoughton with papa."

"But--but--Miss Guion--"

"I'm not going to be married," she continued, in the same even tone. "I
thought perhaps Colonel Ashley might have told you. That's all over."

"All over--how?"

"He's been so magnificent--so wonderful. He stood by me during all my
trouble, never letting me know that he'd changed in any way--"

"Oh, he's changed, has he?"

Because he sat slightly behind her, she missed the thunderous gloom in
his face, while she was too intent on what she was saying to note the
significance in his tone.

"Perhaps he hasn't changed so much, after all. As I think it over I'm
inclined to believe that he was in love with Drusilla from the
first-only my coming to Southsea brought in a disturbing--"

"Then he's a hound! I'd begun to think better of him--I did think better
of him--but now, by God, I'll--"

With a backward gesture of the hand, without looking at him, she made
him resume the seat from which he was again about to spring.

"No, no. You don't understand. He's been superb. He's still superb. He
would never have told me at all if he hadn't seen--"

She stopped with a little gasp.

"Yes? If he hadn't seen--what?"

"That I--that I--I care--for some one else."

"Oh! Well, of course, that does make a difference."

He fell back into the depths of his chair, his fingers drumming on the
table beside which he sat. Minutes passed before he spoke again. He got
the words out jerkily, huskily, with dry throat.

"Some one--in England?"

"No--here."

During the next few minutes of silence he pulled himself imperceptibly
forward, till his elbows rested on his knees, while he peered up into
the face of which he could still see nothing but the profile.

"Is he--is he--coming to Stoughton?"

"He's _going_ to Stoughton. He's been there--already."

If there was silence again it was because he dared not frame the words
that were on his tongue.

"It isn't--it can't be--?"

Without moving otherwise, she turned her head so that her eyes looked
into his obliquely. She nodded. She could utter no more than the
briefest syllables. "Yes. It is."

His lips were parched, but he still forced himself to speak. "Is that
true?--or are you saying it because--because I put up the money?"

She gathered all her strength together. "If you hadn't put up the money,
I might never have known that it was true; but it _is_ true. I think it
was true before that--long ago--when you offered me so much--so
_much!_--that I didn't know how to take it--and I didn't answer you. I
can't tell. I can't tell when it began--but it seems to me very far
back--"

Still bending forward, he covered his eyes with his left hand, raising
his right in a blind, groping movement in her direction. She took it in
both her own, clasping it to her breast, as she went on:

"I see now--yes, I think I see quite clearly--that that's why I
struggled against your help, in the first place.... If it had been
anybody else I should probably have taken it at once.... You must have
thought me very foolish.... I suppose I was.... My only excuse is that
it was something like--like revolt--first against the wrong we had been
doing, and then against the great, sublime thing that was coming up out
of the darkness to conquer me.... That's the way I felt.... I was
afraid.... I wanted something smaller--something more conventional--such
as I'd been trained for.... It was only by degrees that I came to see
that there were big things to live for--as well as little.... It's all
so wonderful!--so mysterious! I can't tell!... I only know that now--"

He withdrew his hand, looking troubled.

"Are you--are you--_sure?_"

She reflected a minute. "I know what makes you ask that. You think I've
changed too suddenly. If so, I can explain it."

The silence in which he waited for her to continue assented in some sort
to this reading of his thoughts.

"It isn't that I've changed," she said, at last, speaking thoughtfully,
"so much as that I've wakened to a sense of what's real for me as
distinguished from what's been forced and artificial. You may understand
me better if I say that in leading my life up to--up to recently, I've
been like a person at a play--a play in which the situations are
interesting and the characters sympathetic, but which becomes like a
dream the minute you leave the theater and go home. I feel that--that
with you--I've--I've got home."

He would have said something, but she hurried on.

"I've not changed toward the play, except to recognize the fact that it
_was_ a play--for me. I knew it the instant I began to learn about
papa's troubles. That was like a summons to me, like a call. When it
came, everything else--the things I'd been taught to strive for and the
people whom I had supposed to be the only ones worth living with, grew
distant and shadowy, as though they belonged to a picture or a book. It
seemed to me that I woke then for the first time to a realization of the
life going on about me here in my own country, and to a sense of my
share in it. If I hadn't involved myself so much--and involved some one
else with me--my duty would have been clearer from the start. But
Colonel Ashley's been so noble!--he's understood me so well!--he's
helped me so much to understand myself!--that I can't help honoring him,
honoring him with my whole heart, even if I see now that I don't--that I
never did--care for him in the way--"

She pressed her handkerchief to her lips to keep back what might have
become a sob.

"Did you know I--I loved you?" he asked, still speaking hoarsely.

"I thought you must," she said, simply. "I used to say I hoped you
didn't--but deep down in my heart--"

He got up and strode to the window, where, with his back to her, he
stared awhile at the last cold glimmer of the sun set. His big frame and
broad shoulders shut out the light to such an extent that when he turned
it was toward a darkened room. He could barely see her, as she sat
sidewise to the desk, an arm along the back of her chair. His attitude
bespoke a doubt in his mind that still kept him at a distance.

"You're not--you're _not_--saying all this," he pleaded, "because you
think I've done anything that calls for a reward? I said once that I
should never take anything from you, and I never shall--unless it's
something you give only because you can't help it."

Her answer was quite prompt. "I'm not giving anything--or doing
anything. What has happened seems to me to have come about simply and
naturally, like the sunrise or the seasons, because it's the fullness of
time and what God means. I can't say more about it than that. If it
depended on my own volition I shouldn't be able to speak of it so
frankly. But now--if you want me--as you wanted me once--"

She rose and stood by her chair, holding herself proudly and yet with a
certain meekness. With his hands clasped behind him, as though even yet
he dared not touch her, he crossed the twilit room toward her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Late that night Henry Guion stood on the terrace below the
Corinthian-columned portico. There was no moon, but the stars had
the gold fire with which they shine when the sky is violet. Above
the horizon a shimmering halo marked the cluster of cities and towns.
In the immediate foreground the great elm was leafless now, but for
that reason more clearly etched against the starlight--line on line,
curve on curve, sweeping, drooping, interlaced. Guion stood with head
up and figure erect, as if from strength given back to him. Even
through the darkness he displayed some of the self-assurance and
stoutness of heart of the man with whom things are going well. He was
remembering--questioning--doubting.

"I had come to the end of the end ... and I prayed ... yes, I
_prayed_.... I asked for a miracle ... and the next day it seemed to
have been worked.... Was it the prayer that did it?... Was it any one's
prayer?... Was it any one's faith?... Was it--God?... Had faith and
prayer and God anything to do with it?... Do things happen by
coincidence and chance?... or is there a Mind that directs them?... I
wonder!... I wonder!..."




THE END






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