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."