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?"