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."