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?"