"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."